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MISCELLANIES. 



REV. JAMES MARTINEAU. 



BOSTON: 
WM. CROSBX AND H. P. NICHOLS, 

111 Washington Street. 

NEW YORK: 
C. S. FRANCIS AND COMPANY. 

1852. 



«$& 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by 

Wm. Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



CAMBRIDGE: 
METCALF AND COMPANY, 

PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. 



PRE F AC E. 



Mr. Martineau is already known to a wide cir- 
cle of grateful readers in this country by the two 
volumes of " Endeavors after the Christian Life." 
A desire has often been expressed by those who 
have been familiar with his miscellaneous papers, 
that they should be collected in a volume. In re- 
sponse to such requests, a few of them are brought 
together and offered here; and the publishers feel 
that they are discharging a duty, in redeeming ar- 
ticles of such a character from their seclusion in the 
English periodicals, and bringing them to the notice 
of the American public. 

Any thing in the nature of a review, or extended 
advertisement of their merits here, would be as in- 
delicate as it is unnecessary. The rare qualities of 



IV PREFACE. 

genius that distinguish Mr. Martineau's writings are 
apparent to every competent reader. It will be seen 
that high themes are discussed in this volume, and 
great names examined, that stand for widely dif- 
ferent religious systems. The treatment, we are 
sure, will not be found unworthy of the subjects, but 
distinguished by a loftiness of tone, a catholic candor, 
a severity of logic and intellectual fidelity amid all 
the difficulties of the question in hand, a clearness 
of moral discrimination, and an affluence of imagery 
and vigorous precision of expression, which, how- 
ever unusual, will not surprise those who are ac- 
quainted with any of the author's productions, and 
cannot fail to make these papers valuable and wel- 
come to all earnest thinkers, even to such as cannot 
come into full sympathy with the theories of faith 
and the estimates of men which are offered to their 
consideration. 

A better service could hardly be done, in the pres- 
ent state and tendencies of theological opinion 
among the liberal Christians of this country, than to 
give a selection from the theological discourses and 
philosophical miscellanies of Mr. Martineau, which 



PREFACE. 



treat prominently and discuss thoroughly the re- 
lations of faith and records, and the differences be- 
tween a spiritual and a sacrificial religion. The 
present volume, not having been arranged with such 
reference, can only in part fulfil such a service. Nei- 
ther does the selection here made do full justice to 
their author. It is not, probably, such as he would 
have made, if scientific and literary considerations 
had controlled his choice. Certainly it is to be re- 
gretted that the papers on "Whewell's Systematic 
Morality," « MorelFs History of Modern Philos- 
ophy," "Dr. Channing's Memoirs," " Mesmeric Athe- 
ism," and "The Creed of Christendom," could not 
have accompanied the larger, and perhaps more 
timely articles, on the Church of England, and the 
Battle of the Churches. These last, however, have 
already excited such notice and admiration in this 
country, that their insertion seemed imperatively 
called for, and, by publishing them in connection with 
the essay on " Church and State," unity of theme 
and interest is gained for a large portion of the 
volume. The other papers, with more of kindred 
topics, are in reserve for a second volume, should 



VI PREFACE. 

another be required. In the hope that the taste of 
our community may be exhibited in such a demand, 
the present collection is commended to the public. 

It may not be amiss to state, that the article on 
Dr. Priestley has been revised, and several errors of 
the English press in other essays have been cor- 
rected, for this edition, by the author. 

T. S. K. 



CONTENTS. 



The Life, Character, and Works of Dr. Priest- 
ley, 1 

The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Ar- 
nold, D. D., 56 

Church and State, 105 

Theodore Parker's Discourse of Religion, . 163 

Phases of Faith, 216 

The Church of England, 281 

The Battle of the Churches, . . . 373 



MISCELLANIES. 



THE LIFE, CHARACTER, AND WORKS 
OF DR. PRIESTLEY* 

[From the Monthly Repository for 1833.] 

When a new planet is discovered, it requires time 
to assign it its true place in the solar system. The 
observer must know his own movements, or he may- 
pronounce its progressive course to be retrograde; 
and he must trace it through many degrees of its 
track, before he can lay down its course, and esti- 
mate its speed, and measure its eccentricity. In 
like manner a great and luminous mind cannot have 
its just position in the social system allotted at once : 
the less so as the moral vision of mankind has no 
achromatic wherewith to penetrate the deep spaces 
of intellect. It will be long before the first confident 
speculations on the new phenomenon give place to 
the computations of truth and reason. Presump- 
tion will maintain that it is but a meteor, soon to 
dip below the horizon : superstition will broadly 

* The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, 
LL. D., F. R. S., in twenty-five volumes. Edited, with Notes, by John 
Towill Rutt. Vol. I. Life and Correspondence. 
1 



4, MARTINEAtfS MISCELLANIES. 

hint that any thing which swims so near the source 
of light and heat endangers the world's temperature, 
and will burn us up as it sweeps by ; and many are 
the years on whose darkness it must shine, ere its 
course be traced, and it be found to be humanity's 
morning and evening star. The time necessary for 
the appreciation of a conspicuous mind will vary 
according to the nature of its genius and the state 
of society in which it is put forth ; but in proportion 
as it addresses itself to the general mind, and finds 
access to the general mind, will a true verdict be 
speedily passed. Large masses of men are more 
just, more discerning, more generous, than small; 
more ashamed of all petty passions ; less inclined to 
idolatry on the one hand, and to envy on the other. 
Imaginative genius, which in these days speaks to a 
splendid audience, standing amid an amphitheatre 
of nations, receives an answer of glorious acclaim to 
its cry of " Plaudite ! " while originality in science, 
in theology, and even in political philosophy, appre- 
ciable at first only by schools and sects of men, 
waits for justice till the school or the sect becomes, 
in numbers and intelligence, coextensive with so- 
ciety at large. Scott and Byron have received the 
homage of their own times ; but such men as Priest- 
ley or Bentham must wait the revolutions of opinion, 
and the regeneration of social institutions, before the 
due rites of honor are enacted over their graves. 

Posterity, like Providence, rewards men according 
to their deeds. To their tribunal oblivion must give 
up its dead. "What place will then be allotted to 
Dr. Priestley, among the benefactors of mankind, 



DR. PRIESTLEY. O 

we will not presume to decide ; sure we are it will 
be no mean one. And, in the mean while, it is evi- 
dent that the time is approaching for a correct and 
final estimate of his merits. His contemporaries, 
with their indiscriminate praise or censure, have, for 
the most part, retired from the scene ; and a new 
generation, partly educated by his writings, and able 
to bear testimony to their influence, has stepped 
into their place. The physical science to which, for 
many years, he brought his annual tribute of dis- 
covery, has advanced another stage ; and, apart from 
all rivalry and controversy, can afford to be just to 
his memory, and to devote a chapter of true history 
to its own historian. The philosophy of mind no 
longer pays exclusive honor to the favorites whose 
contempt was too strong for his living fame, and 
ranks among its greatest masters men who expound 
principles akin to his. In some measure his politi- 
cal sympathies seem to have been bequeathed to 
this generation, and the chains have been broken, 
for numbering whose links he became an outcast 
and an exile. And in theology he has had succes- 
sors, who have, in some measure, diverted from him 
the odium which he was wont to bear exclusively: 
theology, however, is singularly tardy in its justice, 
and a fame locked up in theology is scarcely more 
hopeful than an estate locked up in chancery. For 
a fair estimate of this extraordinary man, the advan- 
tages afforded by the complexion of the times are 
enhanced by the new biographical materials which 
have been laid before us by Mr. Rutt. These ma- 
terials consist of Dr. Priestley's letters to his most 



4 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

intimate friends, extending in an almost unbroken 
series through the greater part of his life, and ap- 
pended to the several sections of his autobiography. 
We were disposed at first to wish that more selec- 
tion had been used, and that many letters, which 
convey no new impression of the writer's character, 
no indication of the spirit of his times, had been 
omitted ; and that, notwithstanding the amount of 
interesting small talk which is crowded into the 
notes, they had been occasionally in a less excursive 
style of illustration. But in both these particulars 
it is possible that the editor may have consulted the 
public taste as well as his own vast stock of dissent- 
ing lore. His errors (if errors they be) are those of 
an affectionate and faithful memory ; and the inter- 
est which, in the earlier portion of the biography, is 
weighed down by the indiscriminate mass of corre- 
spondence, is powerfully revived towards the close of 
the volume by the letters from America. It would 
be difficult to find, throughout the whole range of 
epistolary literature, any thing more touching than 
these letters, more pictorial than the impression they 
convey of the aged philosopher in his banishment, 
inspired by his faith to struggle with the shocks of 
circumstance, sustaining cheerfulness and devising 
good in the midst of his solitary sorrows, and feed- 
ing still an interior energy amid the waste of years. 
His seclusion there seems like an appointed interval 
between two worlds, — a central point of observation 
between time and eternity. There is a quietude in 
his letters, which gives them the aspect of letters 
from the dead ; all the activity of life appears in 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 



them as viewed in retrospect, and yet the peace of 
Heaven is still but in prospect ; and they send forth 
tones of indescribable melancholy, which, travelling 
over one of the world's broadest oceans, seem like 
communings from an unearthly state. Yet it is not 
that the Christian sufferer himself desponds; the 
melancholy is not in him, but in the reader ; and it 
is simply our wonder that he could uphold his spirit 
so nobly, which deepens the pathos of his history. 
It is obvious, throughout, that his self-possessed 
serenity comes from the past and the future, and not 
from the present ; and there is a simplicity, a reality, 
in his repeated allusions to his approaching immor- 
tality, which makes us feel perpetually that, step by 
step, we are passing with the venerable man to his 
grave, to meet him on the morrow in a home whence 
there is no exile. 

But we are anticipating. Not that we shall at- 
tempt any chronological narrative of Dr. Priestley's 
life ; our readers will, we trust, seek that from the 
volume whose title stands at the head of this arti- 
cle; — a volume which, by recording not so much 
the events as the labors, the feelings, the habits, the 
discipline, the opinions, of a life ; by exhibiting the 
successive phases of a mind passing from darkness 
towards full-orbed truth, — fulfils the expectations 
with which the student of human nature has a right 
to turn to biography. This volume brings to a close 
Mr. Rutt's protracted and, we fear, ill-requited 
labors, as editor of Dr. Priestley's Theological and 
Miscellaneous Works ; and we would avail ourselves 
of the opportunity to present our readers with an 
1* 



6 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

analysis of Dr. Priestley's character as a theologian, 
a physicien^ a metaphysician, a moralist, and a Chris- 
tian. 

Few problems are more difficult than to determine 
the proportion between the internal* and the external 
causes which create great minds. When genius, op- 
pressed with difficulties, toils its way upwards to the 
light, it is not the difficulty that creates the genius, 
or every man who wrote in a garret might be a 
Johnson or a Sheridan. Still less, when it flutters in 
the atmosphere of courts, is it the warmth of throned 
patronage which tempts its powers into life, or every 
minion of royalty might be a Horace or a Moliere. 
No mind can possess real power which does not im- 
press you with the conviction that, wherever planted, 
it would have found for itself a greatness ; and the 
office of circumstances is but to trace the track of 
its energies. When the stream born among the 
hills tumbles its waters into the valley, it has its 
first channel determined by the mountain surface, 
turned aside by pinnacles of rock, and invited by 
the yielding alluvial soil ; but its ceaseless chafing 
loosens and rolls away the rugged masses that break 
its current, and makes for it a new and a freer way. 
And minds which are to fertilize the world may 
have the windings of their genius traced by influ- 
ences from without; but the same mighty will by 
which they first burst forth to precipitate themselves 
on the world below, will undermine the most frown- 
ing barriers of circumstances, and carve out fresh 
courses for their power. Though Dr. Priestley 
would not have been unknown to the world had he, 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 7 

in conformity with an intention once entertained, 
been doomed to a counting-house in Lisbon, it is 
not difficult to discern several groups of events which 
exercised a deep and lasting influence upon his char- 
acter, and determined the relation in which he 
should stand to society. The first of these is to be 
found in his early religious education, which was 
conducted on the old puritanical model of constraint 
and rigor. There is little doubt that he is right in 
ascribing to this cause the deep sense of religion 
which he maintained through life. His was not 
one of those minds which are necessarily devotional, 
— which, under all conceivable adjustments of cir- 
cumstances, betray their affinity with Heaven, — 
whose religious sympathies, instead of being sup- 
pressed by neglect, or overborne by the tide of ad- 
verse influence, would, like air entangled in the 
ocean-depths, rise the more buoyantly to their native 
element. Such a mind was Heber's, of which you 
can no more think as without piety, than you can 
of color without extension. Deprive it of this cen- 
tral attribute, and there remains an impossible com- 
bination of qualities ; but Dr. Priestley's other qual- 
ities might have existed independently of his devo- 
tion, without any violation of the order of nature. 
In the language of logicians, it was his property ', 
not his essential difference. And, accordingly, we 
believe that, for its full and permanent development, 
a systematic and stimulant discipline was needed ; 
and this was abundantly administered in the coarse 
excitement and Sabbatarian severity of a Calvin- 
istic education. His acknowledgment of the mis- 



8 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

eries accompanying its benefits is remarkable among 
the confessions of orthodoxy : — 

" The weakness of my constitution, which often led me 
to think that I should not be long-lived, contributed to give 
my mind a still more serious turn ; and having read many 
books of experiences, and, in consequence, believing that a 
new birth, produced by the immediateagency of the Spirit 
of God, was necessary to salvation, and not being able to 
satisfy myself that I had experienced any thing of the kind, 
I felt occasionally such distress of mind as it is not in my 
power to describe, and which I still look back upon with 
horror. Notwithstanding I had nothing very material to 
reproach myself with, I often concluded that God had for- 
saken me, and that mine was like the case of Francis Spira, 
to whom, as he imagined, repentance and salvation were 
denied. In that state of mind I remember reading the ac- 
count of c the man in the iron cage,' in the ; Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress,' with the greatest perturbation. 

" I imagine that even these conflicts of mind were not 
without their use, as they led me to think habitually of 
God and a future state. And though my feelings were 
then, no doubt, too full of terror, what remained of them 
was a deep reverence for divine things, and in time a pleas- 
ing satisfaction which can never be effaced, and, I hope, 
was strengthened as I have advanced in life, and acquired 
more rational notions of religion. The remembrance, how- 
ever, of what I sometimes felt in that state of ignorance 
and darkness, gives me a peculiar, sense of the value of 
rational principles of religion, and of which I can give but 
an imperfect description to others. 

" As truth, we cannot doubt, must have an advantage 
over error, we may conclude that the want of these pecu- 
liar feelings is compensated by something of greater value, 



DR. PRIESTLEY. \) 

which arises to others from always having seen things in a 
just and pleasing light ; from having always considered the 
Supreme Being as the kind parent of all his offspring. 
This, however, not having been my case, I cannot be so 
good a judge of the effects of it. At all events, we ought 
always to inculcate just views of things, assuring ourselves 
that proper feelings and right conduct will be the conse- 
quence of them." — pp. 12, 13. 

" Though, after I saw reason to change my opinions, 1 
found myself incommoded by the rigor of the congrega- 
tion with which I was connected, I shall always acknowl- 
edge, with great gratitude, that I owe much to it. The 
business of religion was effectually attended to in it. We 
were all catechized in public till we were grown up, servants 
as well as others : the minister always expounded the Scrip- 
tures with as much regularity as he preached ; and there 
was hardly a day in the week in which there was not some 
meeting of one or other part of the congregation. On one 
evening there was a meeting of the young men for conver- 
sation and prayer. This I constantly attended, praying ex- 
tempore with others, when called upon. 

" At my aunt's there was a monthly meeting of women, 
who acquitted themselves in prayer as well as any of the 
men belonging to the congregation. Being at first a child 
in the family, I was permitted to attend their meetings, and 
growing up insensibly, heard them, after I was capable of 
judging. My aunt, after the death of her husband, prayed 
every morning and evening in her family, until I was about 
seventeen, when that duty devolved upon me. 

" The Lord's day was kept with peculiar strictness. No 
victuals were dressed on that day in any family. No mem- 
ber of it was permitted to walk out for recreation, but the 
whole of the day was spent at the public meeting, or at 
home in reading, meditation, and prayer, in the family or 
the closet." — pp. 15 - 17. 



10 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

A question of great moment is here suggested. 
Unitarianism has been tried upon two generations : 
has the experiment justified Dr. Priestley's faith in 
the devotional influences of truth ? Or, for illustra- 
tions of the spirituality which may be conjoined 
with heterodoxy, must we still point to minds which, 
like his, have emerged from Calvinism, and may be 
supposed to have brought their piety thence ? With 
the most fervent confidence in the moral power of 
truth, it may yet be doubted whether the largest 
portion of Unitarian piety has not been imported 
from orthodoxy ; and hence many have been led to 
conclusions favorable to the rigid system of religious 
education. The fact may be admitted, and the in- 
ference denied. It is in no case the rigor, the cere- 
monialism, that makes the saint ; regarded by itself, 
its whole tendency is to produce mental imbecility 
and disgust and unbelief; and wherever it has ex- 
isted as a system, — whenever it has been made the 
instructor's main reliance, — these effects, and no 
others, have followed ; not a gleam of emotion, not 
an impulse of holy desire, has ever come from it. 
But, long as it has been the receptacle of all the 
soul of orthodoxy, it would be strange if its ma- 
chinery had not often been plied by those who 
have made it the vehicle of their own piety, and 
have sent through its dead materials that living 
earnestness of mind, in love of which the young 
will often undergo much that would else be tedious 
and revolting. Wherever Sabbatarianism has fallen 
into such hands, a devotional feeling has resulted, — 
not, indeed, from the system, but from its presiding 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 11 

spirit. To revive the stiff regimen of our forefathers, 
because it sent forth a Priestley and a Lindsey, 
would be like reenacting the Mosaic law, in expec- 
tation of another " sweet singer of Israel." A ritual 
system can no more create a soul, than the study of 
Greek metres can make a poet. It does not, how- 
ever, follow, because sabbatical constraint fails to 
awaken piety, that laxity must certainly succeed ; 
and we rejoice to believe that Unitarians are begin- 
ning to perceive the error of this retaliative logic ; — 
that, while they discard the enthralling formalities 
which rendered their fathers more superstitious than 
devout, they feel, in some degree, the solemn respon- 
sibilities of a spiritual faith; — that, while they rely 
as little as ever on mere externals of devotion, they 
think more of its interior spirit, and study more 
earnestly the means for its nurture. 

Whilst we admit that the conflicts of mind which 
Dr. Priestley describes may have occasioned a per- 
manent susceptibility to religious emotion, we main- 
tain that it was his subsequent conversion which 
gave that susceptibility its only value. His mental 
sufferings were accurate corollaries from his faith ; 
and his mind was too clear-sighted, too sincere, too 
literal, too little imaginative, speedily to have effect- 
ed an escape from them which nothing but self- 
deception and enthusiasm could have accomplished. 
And where, we would ask, is the efficacy of religious 
emotion so miserably perverted ? Neither inspiring 
holiness, nor infusing peace, its influence on the 
active powers is purely paralytic, and on the passive, 
torture. There is no charm in devotional anguish, 



12 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

more than in any other, which should make it a 
thing to be desired; and self-persecution without 
reformation, — tears wrung, not from the conscience, 
but from the creed, — are only new items in the ac- 
count of human misery. It was not, then, till the 
reverential feelings towards the object of faith which 
those struggles implied were transplanted into a 
brighter system, — not till they took their place in a 
religion of duty instead of dogma, — not till they 
changed their character from tormentors to motives, 
from abjectness to love, — that they brought with 
them any blessing to the mind. Calvinism, like the 
magicians of Egypt, could poison and taint the 
salubrious stream ; true religion, like the prophet's 
rod, could alone convert the current of blood into 
the waters of fertility. 

The next important circumstance of his life was 
his conversion ; an event which, from its permanent 
influence on his external relations and his internal 
habits, forms the most momentous change in his 
personal history ; and, from its vast and still increas- 
ing effect on the state of opinion in this country, 
marks an era in the annals of our national Chris- 
tianity. It was brought about by the same qualities 
of mind which had sunk him in the agonizing hu- 
miliation of orthodoxy, — we mean his plain-dealing 
with himself. It is not to the presumptuous, but to 
the humble, not to the self-ignorant, but to the clear- 
minded, student of their own nature, that the shade 
of Calvinism, like that of the fabled Upas-tree, 
proves itself, instead of a sheltering influence, a 
sickening and a deadly blight. Had Dr. Priestley 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 13 

exercised more self-adulation and less perspicacity 
in his dealings with his own mind, he might have 
emerged from his gloomy terrors, into the comfort- 
able persuasion of his own saintship ; but the same 
sincerity which prevented his confounding the op- 
erations of his own thoughts with the agency of 
the Holy Spirit prevented him also from mistaking 
the prepossessions of education for the fulness of 
evidence. There never was a movement of opinion 
more purely characteristic than that of Dr. Priestley. 
It was performed exclusively by the natural gravita- 
tion of his own faculties, with the least possible 
share of impulse from external causes. It was his 
" call " ; and we wish that every call which ortho- 
doxy records were as simply a transaction between 
God and the believer's own mind ; it was his " new 
creation," the brooding of God's spirit, i. e. his own 
thought and conscience, over the chaos of a rude 
creed, and bidding light to struggle through the 
mass, and the elements to fall into a fairer order. 
That the change was progressive, extending over 
sixteen years, not only assimilates it to all that is 
good in God's providence, but indicates its inde- 
pendent character. The opinions which he ultir 
mately embraced were nowhere embodied as a 
whole at the commencement of his inquiries ; some 
of them were not in existence, and the rest were 
barely accessible, scattered through many dissimilar 
writers, — rather hinted than stated; and, if deemed 
worthy of mention for their curiosity, requiring 
apology for their profaneness. 

The collective adoption of the peculiarities con- 
2 



14 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

stituting modern English Unitarianism would then 
have been unnatural, and their adoption from the 
dictation of others' minds impossible. Throughout 
the whole process of theological change which Dr. 
Priestley's opinions underwent, his transition from 
low Arianism to Humanitarianism, which was the 
last important step, is the only one in which the 
reasonings of a predecessor exerted a perceptible in- 
fluence ; and this was occasioned by the writings of 
Dr. Lardner, to be persuaded by whom must be a 
pure concession to evidence. Throughout every 
other stage of his conversion, Dr. Priestley was his 
own commentator ; his inquiries followed the order 
of his own doubts ; his evidence was collected and 
arranged by his own assiduity ; and his conclusions 
drawn by the absolutely solitary exercise of his own 
intellect. 

He has been accused, and by an authority which 
gives weight to the accusation, of having imbibed 
from his age a spirit of innovation. We apprehend 
that the charge involves a material error with regard 
both to his character and his times. A more station- 
ary condition of the social mind than that in which 
his opinions commenced, matured, and almost com- 
pleted their progress, could not perhaps be selected 
from the last two centuries of English history. The 
underworkings of the earthquake had doubtless 
commenced in France; the interior power which 
was to burst through the crust of institutions, and 
rock the nations in alarm, was " getting up its 
steam " : but of this not the most penetrating had a 
glimpse ; all was quiet on the surface, not a growl 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 15 

was heard, not a vibration felt. Had it even been 
otherwise, Dr. Priestley could have been little affect- 
ed, in the early part of his life, by the political oc- 
currences of the Continent, for he was not then in a 
position either to receive or to impart the influence 
supposed ; he was not then the admired philosopher, 
the conspicuous sectary, the obnoxious subject, — 
but the poor, secluded, unpopular preacher of a 
small market-town. The relative chronology of his 
opinions is curious. Not only were his changes of 
mind in complete anticipation of the stimulating 
period which closed the last century, but some of his 
most startling sentiments were the earliest em- 
braced ; he had maintained the inconclusiveness of 
St. Paul's reasoning, gone all lengths with the doc- 
trine of necessity, and rejected his belief in divine 
influence, before he had been in the ministry three 
years. And on the other hand, when the time of 
restless theory came, and all old opinions were loos- 
ened, and the whole creed of society, political, social, 
and religious, was broken up for reconstruction, his 
convictions had been made up; he had not to take 
up his opinions amid the maddening excitement 
which, in the eagerness to enthrone reason, thrust 
her from her seat ; calmer moments had been devoted 
to the task, and in the retrospect of his own mind he 
saw an epitome of the mental revolution whose rapid 
transitions were hurrying by. Hence the steady 
posture which he assumed amid all the revelry of 
speculation which he witnessed ; hence, with all his 
exultation in the new prospect which seemed to 
open upon society, he appeared as a conservator, no 



16 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

less frequently than as an assailant, of existing opin- 
ions. It would indeed be difficult to select from the 
benefactors of mankind one who was less acted 
upon by his age, whose convictions were more en- 
tirely independent of sympathy ; in the whole circle 
of whose opinions you can set down so little to the 
prejudgments of education, to the attractions of 
friendship, to the perverse love of opposition, to the 
contagion of prevailing taste, or to any of the irreg- 
ular moral causes which, independently of evidence, 
determine the course of human belief. We do not 
assert that he was not precipitate; we do not say 
that he cast away no gems of truth in clearing from 
the sanctuary the dust of ages; we do not deny 
that, in his passion for simplification, he did some- 
times run too rapidly through a mystery, and pro- 
pound inconsiderate explanations of things deeper 
than his philosophy. But we maintain that his 
sources of fallacy, whatever they were, were from 
within, and not from without; that he was no man 
for the second-hand errors of indolent or imitative 
intellects ; that his faults were all those of a search- 
ing, copious, and original mind. 

We have said that Dr. Priestley's theological in- 
quiries followed the order of his doubts : his conver- 
sion followed the order of his inquiries, his publica- 
tions the order of his conversion, and his influence 
the order of his publications. Hence in part has 
arisen among Unitarians a conventional arrangement 
of their theological peculiarities, always beginning 
with the question respecting the person of Christ, 
and ending with Universal Restoration. Every com- 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 17 

plete published defence of their tenets, and almost 
every systematic course of public lectures in their 
chapels, exhibits this particular sequence of faith. It 
was not unnatural that the order of investigation 
should become, in Dr. Priestley's mind, the order of 
importance : in each succeeding inquiry he would 
use, in addition to its independent evidence, the con- 
clusion established in the preceding; and, at the end 
of the process, the first step would seem to be more 
purely and directly drawn from Scripture, and the 
next to be of a more inferential character. The or- 
der of discovery, however, is seldom the best order 
of proof; nor is either the best order for popular ex- 
position ; and we think it, on some accounts, unfor- 
tunate that Unitarianism has disposed itself so inflex- 
ibly along the graduated scale marked out by the 
steps of its modern explorers. "Whether we regard 
it as the negation of orthodoxy, or contemplate it as 
a set of positive and harmonious truths, this restric- 
tion is unnecessary. The ingenious construction of 
the popular system, which indissolubly cements to- 
gether its several dogmas, has its perils as well as 
its advantages. If any one of its tenets, on finding 
entrance into the mind, introduces its companions 
in its train, any one of them, on its departure, opens 
an exit for all the rest. It matters little, then, where 
you begin the assault ; the battery of your logic is 
circular, and, commence the fire where you may, 
will sweep the field. Or take the more interesting 
view of Unitarian Christianity, as a cluster of pos- 
itive doctrines, and the same remark holds good. 
With far less of the artificial ingenuity of system 
2* 



18 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

than the prevalent theology, it has still the natural 
harmony of truth ; and the affinities which blend to- 
gether its parts are so close, as to spread a chain 
of delicate yet unbroken influence through the whole; 
and communicate the first spark of thought where 
you will, it will shoot from link to link to the farthest 
extremity. Unitarianism, we think, must discover 
more variety in its resources, must avail itself of 
more flexibility of appeal, must wield in turn its crit- 
ical, its philosophical, its social, its poetical, its devo- 
tional powers, before it gain its destined ascendency 
over the mind of Christendom. "With great respect 
for the able contributions which Christian truth has 
received from its departed champions, we still must 
regard them as only contributions ; and think that 
the controversy must be again and again rewritten, 
and its whole form recast, before it may begin to 
number its triumphs. 

Though no external influences could produce that 
extraordinary versatility which characterized Dr. 
Priestley, the circumstances in his history which 
tended to encourage it are not unworthy of a pass- 
ing notice. During the lapse of seven years from 
the termination of his college life, he found himself 
in three different situations, each presenting strong, 
and almost exclusive, motives to a separate class of 
pursuits. First came a ministry of three years in a 
small country town, affording no occasions of active 
duty, and no distractions of society. Compelled to 
live on thirty pounds a year, watched, suspected, 
and partially deserted, by a congregation whose pie- 
ty vented itself in dread of heterodoxy, and finding 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 19 

little congenial sentiment among his neighboring 
brethren, he devoted himself entirely to theological 
study, for which alone his library afforded him scope. 
Next he was a schoolmaster at Nantwich, under the 
same inability which every conscientious schoolmas- 
ter feels, to attend to any thing beyond the duties of 
his office ; and accordingly we here find him study- 
ing grammar and language. Thence he removed to 
"Warrington, and there gave himself up with aston- 
ishing energy to the preparation of lectures on the 
theory of language, on oratory and the belles lettres, 
on history and general policy ; — a class of topics 
almost entirely new to him, and for excellence in 
which there was little provision in the predominant 
qualities of his mind. Yet what he wanted of the 
critic's delicate perception he compensated by the 
philosopher's comprehensive views ; and though his 
labors in these departments may not be destined to 
live, there is in his treatment of his subjects a breadth 
and magnitude and metaphysical spirit, which con- 
trasts favorably with the small and superficial criti- 
cism of his predecessors in the same field. In his 
conception of his object he is as much their superior, 
as he is inferior to the noble school of German crit- 
ics, whose genius has, in our own day, penetrated 
the mysteries, and analyzed the spirit, of poetry and 
the arts. 

Before he quitted his office of tutor, and after he 
had completed the composition of his lectures, an in- 
troduction to Dr. Price and Dr. Franklin gave the 
first impulse to his philosophical pursuits. Whether 
this event be estimated by its effect on his fame or 



20 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

that upon his character, it must be regarded as 
among the most important in his life. The unpar- 
alleled ardor with which he prosecuted his newly ac- 
quired objects, and the signal success by which it 
was at once recompensed and stimulated, soon ren- 
dered it manifest that his intellect had found its 
appropriate direction ; and from this time, until his 
career was checked by persecution, he continued to 
give to the world a series of discoveries, capable of 
comparison, in their variety and productiveness, with 
the achievements of the most honored names in the 
records of physical science. Of the qualities of mind 
which he brought to the study of Nature and her 
laws, it will be our business to speak hereafter : we 
notice his philosophical pursuits here, merely as they 
relate to the history of his character. Great as their 
influence upon him was, they wrought no revolution, 
no change, in his habits and feelings. All that he 
had been he continued to be ; all that he had done 
he continued to do. Their operation was one of 
pure addition. They extended his reverential gaze 
on creation over a wider field ; they quickened his 
marvellous activity ; they expanded his benevolence ; 
they deepened his piety ; they illustrated his own 
principle, that every intellectual and moral attain- 
ment sheds illumination on every other, and that 
mental power multiplies itself indefinitely : and they 
completed that rare combination of qualities by 
which, in an age of infidelity and of arbitrary power, 
science, liberty, and religion all found in him a fit- 
ting representative. 

Thus much we have said respecting the circum- 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 21 

stances which were most deeply concerned in deter- 
mining the career of this eminent philosopher and di- 
vine. Our readers may wonder that we have omit- 
ted to notice the two most remarkable events of his 
history, — his persecution at Birmingham and his 
retreat to America. The truth is, that the most 
romantic passages of human life are not always the 
most influential : our object has been, not to furnish 
an interesting narrative, but to sketch the records of 
a mind ; and we think that the occurrences just men- 
tioned, taking place as they did, in the maturity of 
Dr. Priestley's mind, were means rather of indicating 
and developing than of forming his character. They 
will find, therefore, a more appropriate place in the 
analysis which we propose to attempt of that char- 
acter in its intellectual, moral, and religious rela- 
tions. 

If any one were to put forth the prospectus of a 
Cyclopaedia, proposing to write all the articles him- 
self, he would be set down for a genius or a mad- 
man. His admirers would think him the wonder of 
the world ; his opponents would cry out upon him as 
a shallow pretender. To the discerning, the concep- 
tion of such a design would disclose the true char- 
acter of his mind. To imagine the outline, and 
glance even rapidly from the Alpha to the Omega of 
human attainments, implies no ordinary power; to 
look over the wide continent of knowledge, and see 
it mapped out in all its bearings, and trace the great 
skeleton truths which form its mountain barriers, 
and follow the streams of beauty that wind below 
their base, is the prerogative of none but the com- 



22 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

prehensive and far-sighted mind. But to suppose 
that the same intellect which sketches the outline 
can fill up the details, that he who understands the 
mutual relations of the different departments of sci- 
ence and art can unfold all their mysteries, betrays a 
miscalculation of the voluminous contents of human 
knowledge, and an ignorance of the varieties of in- 
tellectual power requisite to embrace them all. To 
refer to a catalogue of Dr. Priestley's works is like 
consulting a prospectus of a Cyclopaedia ; and it is 
impossible to remember that they are all the produc- 
tions of one individual, without the impression that 
his mind was more adventurous than profound, and 
its vision more telescopic than microscopic. How 
far this impression is just we may attempt to ascer- 
tain. We believe it to be the truth, but not the 
whole truth. 

There can be no doubt that versatility was the 
great characteristic of Dr. Priestley's genius. Singu- 
larly quick of apprehension, he made all his acqui- 
sitions with facility and rapidity ; and hence he de- 
rived a confidence in the working-power of his own 
mind, and a general faith in the sufficiency of the 
human faculties as instruments of knowledge, which 
led him on to achievement after achievement in the 
true spirit of intellectual enterprise. This excur- 
siveness of mind was encouraged by his metaphysi- 
cal creed. It has been the prevailing error of the 
Hartleian school, that they have made too light of 
the original differences of mental capability, con- 
scious, perhaps, that their philosophy has hitherto 
failed to explain them : and the natural consequence 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 23 

of incredulity respecting the existence of peculiar 
genius is to give increased reliance on the efficacy 
of self-discipline, to lessen the motive to a division 
of intellectual labor, and make the mind a servant 
of all work. We are aware, however, that no specu- 
lative tenet is enough to account for the mental pecu- 
liarities of the individual who holds it ; for the adop- 
tion of the tenet is itself a mental phenomenon, re- 
quiring to be explained, and frequently arising from 
that very constitution of mind which is supposed to 
be its effect. That Dr. Priestley thought little of the 
exclusive fitness of peculiar understandings for pecu- 
liar pursuits, is to be ascribed to the absence of any 
exclusive tendency in himself; that he was disposed 
to try every thing, arose from his having failed in 
nothing; the consciousness of power must precede 
the belief in power; and the philosophy of the senti- 
ment, Possunl, qui posse videntur, is incomplete till 
the converse is added, Qui possunt, posse videntur. 

Dr. Priestley's extraordinary versatility, then, while 
it was confirmed by his intellectual philosophy, is 
to be traced to his possession of original endow- 
ments, bearing an equal relation to many depart- 
ments of knowledge. In theology, in mental and 
moral science, and, above all, in experimental chem- 
istry, his rapidity and copiousness of association, his 
prompt perception of analogies, his faith in the 
consistency of creation's laws, and his consequent 
passion for simplicity, were all available as means 
of detecting error, and aids in the discovery of truth. 
And the excellence which these qualities enabled him 
to attain in his several pursuits was of the same 



24 

kind in all. In none did they confer on him super- 
lative merit ; in some, at least, they led him into 
great faults : but in every one they fitted him to be 
the able and dauntless explorer, powerful to pene- 
trate the terra incognita of mystery, and quick to re- 
turn enriched with the spoils of fresh thought. Year 
after year he visited the temple of truth, and hung 
upon its walls some new exuviae : and who can 
wonder that his offerings in their abundance were 
more miscellaneous than rare; that they consisted 
not always of the gold and the silver which could 
be for ever deposited in the sacred treasury, but 
sometimes of the scattered arms and fragments of 
wreck which were of little worth but as trophies of 
victory ? He was the ample collector of materials 
for discovery, rather than the final discoverer him- 
self; a sign of approaching order, rather than the pro- 
ducer of order himself. We remember an amusing 
German play, designed as a satire upon the philos- 
ophy of atheism, in which Adam walks across the 
stage, going to be created: and, though a paradox, 
it may be said that truth, as it passed through Dr. 
Priestley's mind, was going to be created : the requi- 
site elements were there; the vital principle was 
stirring amid them, and producing the incipient 
types of structures that were yet to be ; but there 
was much that was unfit to. undergo organization, 
much that could never be transmuted into forms of 
beauty, or filled with the inspiration of life ; and 
there must be other processes, before the mass 
emerges a graceful and a breathing frame. 

The characteristic qualities of Dr. Priestley's un- 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 25 

derstanding led him to prosecute, with the greatest 
ardor, those subjects of inquiry in which but little 
progress had been made. The earlier and less exact 
stage of a science, which promises a great affluence 
of new phenomena, and admits of only the lower 
degree of generalization, and prepares the approach 
to the establishment of merely empirical laws, was 
that to which his powers were adapted. At a more 
advanced period of its history, when the field of 
observation is narrowed, and the demand for precise 
deduction increased, and where no appeal to fact 
can be of use, unless of the most refined and delicate 
kind, his faculties could have found no appropriate 
employment. In the age of Galileo he would prob- 
ably have gained a reputation for discoveries in 
optics or astronomy: in our days he might have 
aided the progress of geology : but in his own gen- 
eration the former had passed, while the latter had 
not reached the point at which alone he was able to 
apply an effective stimulus. It may be doubted 
whether, if he were living now, he would not find 
chemistry in advance of his peculiar genius ; whether 
its greatest discovery, the law of definite propor- 
tions, which has eminently enhanced the dignity, by 
increasing the precision of the science, would not 
appear to have spoiled it for his hand : and were a 
question to arise, what branch of it would retain 
the greatest attractions for a mind like his, no one 
could hesitate to answer, electro-chemistry, in which 
there is mystery enough still to stimulate an ardor 
like his, and glimpses enough of wonderful and ex- 
tensive laws to inspire the investigator with the 
3 



26 

perpetual feeling that he is on the eve of great dis- 
coveries. Could we have been permitted to select a 
period in the history of science with whose spirit 
his mind was most congenial, we should have set 
him down among the contemporaries or immediate 
followers of Bacon ; when, to a new and intelligent 
system of inquiry, Nature began to whisper her 
mighty secrets; when every penetrative mind that 
understood their value rushed to her shrine and lis- 
tened reverentially to the great oracle; when the 
rapidity of discovery, following close on a dreary 
track of centuries barren of philosophy, gratified the 
love both of the wonderful and of the true ; and 
when the passionate relish for fresh knowledge pre- 
vented the observance of definitive boundaries be- 
tween its different regions, and tempted the inquirer 
to a wide and adventurous range. Dr. Priestley has 
recorded of himself, that he exercised without diffi- 
culty the power of exclusive attention to any object 
of study ; but it would be a great error to suppose, 
that this mental habit in him was the same with 
that profound and steady abstraction which charac- 
terized the intellect of Newton, and amid whose 
stillness he slowly paced the upward steps of induc- 
tion to the sublimest law of the material creation. 
Dr. Priestley's attention was eager rather than pa- 
tient, active rather than laborious ; suited to subjects 
whose relations are various and simple, rather than 
few and intricate ; inclined to traverse kindred prov- 
inces of thought in quest of illustration, more than 
to remain immovable in the construction of a proof. 
His mind would become restive, if it had not scope. 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 27 

It was incapable of proceeding long in the linear 
track of mathematical logic. The illumination of 
his genius was rather diffusive than concentrated. 
He could never have singled out any one phenome- 
non, and planted it in an intense focus of intellect- 
ual light, till he had fused it into its elements, and 
could exhibit its minutest component in distinct 
separation from the rest. The kind of accurate ob- 
servation and cautious analysis and finished induc- 
tion which Dr. Bradley manifested in his discovery 
of the aberration of light, and which at once de- 
tected, measured, and explained, by reference to a 
new cause, one of the minutest phenomena of the 
heavens, must be sought in a different order of intel- 
lect from Dr. Priestley's. 

During the origin of a science, when the object is 
to accumulate facts and arrange them according to 
their more obvious affinities, the quality most needed 
by the philosopher is the quick perception of analo- 
gies which we have ascribed to Dr. Priestley. Dur- 
ing its higher progress, ""when the object is to include 
large classes of facts under some general theory, or 
to measure the precise amount of causes already 
discovered, the quality most needed is a searching, 
discriminative power ; a quality most rarely united 
with the former, and certainly not distinguishing the 
philosopher of whom we speak. Had he possessed 
it, few names greater than his would have appeared 
in the world's roll of honor. Because he wanted it, 
many of his philosophical works will have to be 
rewritten. Non omnis morietur ; but while his opin- 
ions will live, his own exposition of them will hardly 



28 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

satisfy the wants of a future age. That Dr. Hartley, 
at a time when no very precise limits had been 
drawn between physical and metaphysical science, 
should have entwined together a great truth in the 
philosophy of mind with a gratuitous speculation in 
the physiology of brain, is not surprising : that Dr. 
Priestley should have perceived that the doctrine of 
association was a fact, and the doctrine of vibrations 
a fancy, and have disentangled them from each 
other, is no more than might have been expected of 
his discernment : but that he should have separated 
them merely on the ground of their different evi- 
dence, without discovering their different provinces ; 
that, in his character of metaphysician, he should 
still have manifested a hankering after the very 
theory of which he had disencumbered his great 
master's philosophy ; that he should have been mis- 
led by the plausible analogy which promises to ex- 
plain the phenomena of mind by the changes of 
matter, — indicates a want of clear perception with 
respect to the due limits of mental science which 
should have been reserved as the exclusive glory of 
the phrenologists. Dr. Priestley evidently thought, 
that, if there were but proof of the doctrine of vibra- 
tions, it might be duly expounded from the chair of 
moral philosophy; and had no idea that the pro- 
fessor who should do so would deserve a caning for 
his impertinence from his brother of the physiological 
school. Nor is this the only instance which marks 
his deficiency of acute discriminative power. The 
true test of this rarest and highest of human facul- 
ties is to be found in the researches of mental sci- 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 



29 



ence ; its most refined exercise is required, and its 
greatest triumphs are achieved, in unravelling the 
subtile processes of reason, in penetrating the mov- 
ing throng of thoughts and feelings, and, through 
all their magic changes, distinguishing the separate 
character and origin of each ; and clear as a lens 
must that mind be, which, in transmitting through 
it the white light of intellect, can faithfully decom- 
pose it into its elemental colors. Dr. Priestley had 
far too much perspicacity not to perceive that mental 
analysis might be pushed much further, and, if intel- 
lectual science is to rank with other sciences, must 
be pushed much further, than it had been carried by 
the orthodox philosophers of Scotland. But we 
cannot think him happy in the specimens of analysis 
which he has left ; often ingenious, they are seldom 
complete; they amount only to approximate solu- 
tions of the problem which he was encountering; 
they frequently furnish valuable hints to the future 
inquirer, and set him in the right track ; but in his 
eagerness to reach the object of his search, Dr. 
Priestley overleaps many needful steps of the pro- 
cess, or breaks off in the midst, and deems the task 
accomplished which a more careful thinker would 
feel to be only commenced. This disposition to post 
through a difficulty, and see nothing in it, is espe- 
cially apparent, we think, in his account of the idea 
of power, and in his attempt to explain the phe- 
nomena of memory; and throughout his works it 
would be in vain to look for any thing like the ana- 
lytical ingenuity of which later writers belonging to 
the same school, especially Brown and Mill, afford 



30 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

such elaborate, though unsatisfactory display. His 
merits in the department of mental science consist 
less in the success with which he attacked its diffi- 
culties, than the skill with which he multiplied its 
applications ; less in the light which he introduced 
into its interior recesses, than in the range of kindred 
subjects over which he spread its illumination. In 
his mind morals, history, religion, appeared tinged 
with it, and thence adorned with greater dignity. In- 
stances of this are to be found in his " History of 
Early Opinions," his sermons " On Habitual Devo- 
tion," " On Habit," " On the Duty of not Living to 
Ourselves," and above all, in his " Analogy of the 
Divine Dispensations " ; an essay which may be re- 
garded as perhaps the happiest effort of his mind, 
involving precisely that brief and simple exposition 
of a metaphysical principle with copiousness and 
magnitude of application, to which his powers were 
peculiarly adapted. There is, too, a solemnity in it, 
arising from the congeniality of its train of thought 
with all his faculties of intellect and soul, which is 
rarely perceptible in his writings. It is philosophy 
kindling itself into worship. 

Dr. Priestley's rank as a linguist and a critic may 
be inferred from the qualities which we have already 
ascribed or denied to him. The same fertility of 
association and love of analogy which facilitated to 
him the acquisition of a foreign language up to a 
certain point, rendered his complete mastery of it 
almost impossible. He wanted the imperturbable 
patience, the nice eye for minute differences, the un- 
wearied faith in the importance of an apparent 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 31 

trifle, which are requisite to the character of the 
accomplished philologist. His knowledge of the 
laws of thought rendered him a perspicuous inter- 
preter of the theory of language; and, if the sub- 
ject had been strongly urged upon his attention, 
would perhaps have made him a successful student 
of philosophical etymology, would have enabled him 
to detect the relations which group together in a few 
great families the whole population of words in the 
same language, and, having thus laid bare its pri- 
meval state, to trace the successive steps of associa- 
tion by which it has multiplied its resources, and 
refined its susceptibilities with the increasing wants 
and more delicate perceptions of the minds whose 
instruments it has been. There was nothing, at 
least, to prevent his delineation of the outline of 
such a history ; the details must have partaken of 
the defects already noticed in his mental analyses. 
Be this as it may, however, the attempt was never 
made. Nothing could ever have made him forget 
that language is only the vehicle of ideas, and the 
study of it, therefore, only a means to an end ; and 
we suspect that few who are habitually impressed 
with this undeniable truth will become men of eru- 
dition. We do not question the importance of 
minute criticism ; we admit that without it the ivhole 
meaning of an author cannot be developed, and that 
the lights and shades of expression which it brings 
out are really lights and shades of thought, consti- 
tuting an essential element in the graces of a for- 
eign literature. But most readers are utilitarians; 
of the amount of meaning which they lose by an 



32 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

accuracy not absolutely finished they are necessarily 
unconscious, the quantity which they gain will seem 
enough for their purpose ; and, unless they possess 
a sensitiveness of taste seldom to be found, and read 
in order to gratify their perception of the beautiful, 
they will feel little inducement to brace themselves 
to the long, barren toils of the professed linguist. It 
may be doubted, however, whether Dr. Priestley 
renounced the needful labor upon any such deliber- 
ate calculation, and whether he did not greatly un- 
derrate the attainments requisite for a philologist. 
At least, we cannot but think that many of our grave 
professors, who can lecture an hour upon a word, 
would smile at his characteristic project of trans- 
lating the whole Hebrew Scriptures himself, during 
the interval^ of other occupations, in three or four 
years. 

Dr. Priestley has repeatedly recorded of himself a 
remarkable deficiency of memory ; a want to be 
regretted less on its own account than because, in 
conjunction with another cause, it involved a mental 
failure of a more serious kind, — a weakness of con- 
ception. By conception we mean the power of 
bringing vividly before the thoughts, in combination, 
the parts of any object or any scene which has been 
presented to the senses or the mind. It is emphati- 
cally the pictorial faculty needed by the illustrating 
artist, when, having gathered from Milton or from 
Byron the elements of his design, he brings them 
harmoniously together, and groups his figures, and 
makes his perspective, and disposes his lights ; 
needed by the historian, when, having learned the 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 33 

catalogue of a great man's deeds, he blends these 
fragments into an image of his mind; or, having 
collected the dispersed events of a period, he dis- 
poses them in due relation before his view, so as to 
become familiar with the spirit of the time ; needed 
equally by the theologian, that he may live in 
thought through the sacred days of old, and become 
pilgrim in heart to the Holy Land ; that he may not 
only know how many stamens there are in the lilies 
of the field, and how many feet in the cedar's height, 
but see how they grace the plains of Jericho, or wave 
upon the top of Lebanon ; not only count the steps 
of the temple and tell the manufacture of the priest's 
robe, but gaze on the majestic pile from the Mount 
of Olives, or stand in the resplendence of its golden 
gate, and hear the murmur of the prayers, and watch 
the incense curling to the skies; not merely dis- 
course on the properties of hyssop, and conjecture 
of what timber the cross was made, but mingle 
with the weeping daughters of Jerusalem, and raise 
a reverential eye towards the crucified, and listen to 
that fainting cry of filial tenderness. Now, both in 
his histories and in his theology, Dr. Priestley's de- 
ficiency of conception is much felt. In the former 
there is not, as far as we remember, a single deline- 
ation of character, a scene or a cluster of incidents 
as a whole, and consequently not any picture that 
leaves a strong impression upon the reader's mind : 
they are accounts, not of persons but of actions, not 
of eras but of events : the trains of contemporary 
occurrences in different localities are placed before 
us like a number of parallel lines, with no attempt 



34 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

to twine them together; and each course of succes- 
sive events like so many points, not melted into a 
continuous line. The nature of ecclesiastical his- 
tory itself offers, it is true, a great obstacle to the 
preservation of unity ; it is in its very essence a dis- 
location ; a number of events which form no proper 
class in themselves ; a part arbitrarily cut out from 
the whole, comprising effects removed from their 
causes, and causes left alone by their effects : and, 
independently of this difficulty, the materials of 
ecclesiastical history are unpromising enough. Yet 
there are portions containing elements for strong im- 
pression ; there are persecutions, and councils, and 
crusades ; there are the broad contrasts of an idola- 
trous civilization and a barbarous Christianity, of the 
genius of Rome and the spirit of Christ, of the re- 
ligion of the East and the philosophy of the West ; 
there are matchless heroes of conscience in the Al- 
pine fastnesses, and intrepid reformers in the cities 
of Germany : and there is no reason why the power 
of these passages should be abandoned to the prov- 
ince of fiction. The want of picturesque effect in 
Dr. Priestley's narratives involves in a great degree 
a loss of moral effect ; by giving a ground plan of a 
persecution, and an enumeration of all the horrors it 
contained, he produces rather a disgust at the butch- 
ery than enthusiasm at the magnanimity with which 
it is said to have been met. The merit of his his- 
tories is to be sought, not in their narrative of inci- 
dents, but in their exposition of opinions ; not in the 
facts, but in the inferences ; not in the delineation 
which shows what society was, but in the philosophy 
which proves what it must have been. 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 35 

That the deficiency of which we speak must di- 
minish the interest of his theological writings, that 
it must unfavorably influence their manner, will be 
readily admitted by all ; but it may not be at once 
obvious how it could affect their matter, and lessen 
their intrinsic soundness and truth. It is, however, 
evident that, cceteris paribus, in proportion as an in- 
terpreter of ancient writings can place himself in 
sympathy with his author, can plant himself by his 
side and look round on his position, can even take 
occupancy of his -very mind, and discover how all 
things are tinged by the hues of his peculiar intel- 
lect and feelings, the chances are multiplied that the 
interpretation will be correct. Indeed, it is merely 
as aids to this transmutation of mind on the part of 
the student that the labors of the Scripture natural- 
ist, the traveller, and the archseologist are valuable. 
Now Dr. Priestley appears to us to have been in- 
capable of thus laying down his own personality : 
at the foot of Sinai, among the captives of Babylon, 
in audience of the minstrelsy of Israel, on the pave- 
ment of the temple, in the hired house of Paul, or 
with the exile in Patmos, he is the good, plain, spec- 
ulative Dr. Priestley still. He moves like a foreigner 
through all the scenes which he visits, too restless to 
take up his abode in them, and grow warm beneath 
their suns, and find a home among their people, and 
learn the spirit of their joys and sorrows, and be 
ranked as one who " loveth their nation." Accord- 
ingly, his theology is too much an Occidental system 
transplanted into the East ; he sees vastly too much 
philosophy, and vastly too little poetry, in the Scrip- 



36 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

tures. He shows too much disposition to change 
their beautiful histories into imperfect ethics; and 
perhaps, by missing the object which the writers 
had in view, estimates their logic with real injustice. 
Whether illustrations of these peculiarities may not 
be found in his extensive use of the Gnostic philos- 
ophy as a key to the writings of the Apostle John, 
in his interpretations of the Jewish prophecies, in 
his anticipations with respect to the mode of transi- 
tion from this life to another, and in his apprecia- 
tion of the letters of Paul, we leave to be decided in 
the court of enlightened Biblical criticism. Let 
not our admissions with respect to Dr. Priestley's 
theology be unfairly used. A name like his is in- 
deed in little danger from such concessions. Let it 
be remembered that they leave unimpeached the cor- 
rectness of the processes by which he proved and 
proved again the great truths which form the defini- 
tion of Unitarian Christianity ; and until the time 
shall come (and it will not be soon) when the abso- 
lute unity of God, the universality and paternity of 
his government, and the simple humanity of Christ, 
shall need no more defence, recourse will be had to 
the store-house of perspicuous proof which his works 
contain. 

Who can draw for us truly the boundary between 
the intellectual and the active part of human nature ? 
The faculties into which wise men distribute the 
mind, like the hemispheres into which geographers 
divide the earth, though definable enough in theory, 
are hard to discriminate in practice. Nothing clearer 
than the equator upon a paper globe ; and in our 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 37 

paper metaphysics, nothing is easier of discovery 
than that Chapter VI. treats of one faculty, and 
Chapter VII. of another; but Nature is far from 
being so obligingly distinct. We remember the 
days when, in our childish conceptions of crossing 
the line, a piece of graduated cord, belting the earth, 
was discernible ; and philosophy has perhaps been 
chargeable with a similar puerility of expectation in 
its progress from the mental to the moral regions of 
the mind. They blend indistinguishably, and recip- 
rocate their energies, like the waters of the Northern 
and the Southern seas, whose currents flow and 
whose billows roll together, irrespective of the arti- 
ficial limits of science. In the spiritual, however, as 
in the material world, Nature gives notice of our 
approach to her impalpable boundaries: she has 
her realms of transition : the traveller, nearing the 
earth's other half, finds a more copious vegetation, 
and warmer suns, and loftier skies, and bluer hills : 
and the explorer of the soul, passing from the intel- 
lect to the morality of man, will find an intermedi- 
ate region, adorned with a more exuberant foliage of 
thought, invested with a more glowing atmosphere 
of emotion. It is in no trifling sense that the poet- 
ical faculty, the perception and the love of beauty, 
whether physical or moral, may be said to lie be- 
tween the thinking and the motive departments of 
the mind : it cannot be identified with either, yet it 
pervades both : it belongs exclusively to neither, yet 
sheds an influence on both, kindling with new tints 
both truth and goodness : like the constellations of 
the equatorial heavens, it has its stars in both hemi- 
4 



38 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

spheres, and cannot be cut off from either without 
extinguishing some of its essential lights. 

But perhaps we are making a longer pilgrimage 
than was needful from Dr. Priestley's intellectual to 
his moral character; for in fact very little lay be- 
tween. With him duty was a portion of truth, a 
series of inferences from his philosophy ; clear and 
strong conviction, rather than warm affection, char- 
acterized his notions of right. Never was there a 
mind over which moral principle exercised a more 
paramount sway; but his was no blind and super- 
stitious obedience : with him conscience could not 
be moved without being convinced ; but only show 
him on evidence the reasonableness of any habit or 
train of feelings, and he would set himself to its cul- 
tivation without further demur ; he would no more 
have thought of not doing what was right, than of 
not believing what was true. No one can be sur- 
prised that Dr. Priestley repudiated as an absurdity 
the doctrine of an instinctive moral sense; for he 
was singularly free from those mental qualities which 
lead to this belief. It is the natural creed of those 
whose intellects are slow in comparison with the 
quickness of their feelings, whose moral judgment 
possesses a speed too fast for their mental eye to 
trace, flashing on them with such velocity and in- 
tensity that, like the lightning, they seem to dart 
from heaven to earth, without traversing the space 
between. Dr. Priestley's mind was the reverse of 
this ; his emotions were never so intense as to sus- 
pend his observing faculty; and his intellect was 
rapid enough to keep pace with them and mark their 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 



39 



apparent course. His sentiments of moral approba- 
tion and disapprobation sufficiently resembled the 
processes of assent and dissent to send him in quest 
of a common origin for both in the association of 
ideas. 

It is instructive to compare the corresponding parts 
of such different characters as Mrs. Barbauld's and Dr. 
Priestley's ; and in the essay on devotional taste by 
the former, contrasted with the strictures on it by the 
latter, we have a picture of the piety of the exclusive- 
ly poetical, placed side by side with that of the exclu- 
sively philosophical. Every religious mind feels its 
religion to be the loftiest object of its regard, to lie at 
the very summit of its powers ; and in the effort to 
reach the infinite and eternal, in yearning to shadow 
forth the idea of unlimited perfection, naturally seeks 
for its faith an alliance with all that appears most 
interesting and glorious. Mrs. Barbauld's passion 
was for the beautiful and the sublime ; and to her, de- 
votion was poetry, akin to the aspirations of genius : 
Dr. Priestley knew nothing so noble as truth ; and to 
him devotion was philosophy gazing calmly at the 
only object above itself. Mrs. Barbauld saw in all 
creeds some elements of adoration for the heart, and 
dreaded lest controversy should brush off the emo- 
tions they awakened : Dr. Priestley saw in all creeds 
much error, and hoped that controversy would render 
them more quickening, by making them more pure. 
Mrs. Barbauld understood the natural language of 
art, felt the deep expressiveness of whatever is beau- 
tiful in form and sound, and would have given to 
piety the majesty of architecture, and the voice of 



40 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

music : Dr. Priestley thought that the eye and the 
ear, with their physical gratifications, were only in 
the way in the work of realizing great general truth, 
and would have worshipped with the simplicity of 
a spirit in space. Mrs. Barbauld reverenced human 
affections, even in their illusions and extravagances ; 
she saw in them the passion for excellence, and the 
propensity to believe in its reality; she had probably 
observed the important fact (so conspicuous in Dod- 
dridge), that the tempers which are most devotional 
are generally the most tender in their human rela- 
tions ; she could discover no specific difference be- 
tween the emotions yielded to ideal excellence on 
earth, and invisible perfection in heaven; and she 
dared to find an analogy between piety and love : 
Dr. Priestley, little given to Platonisms of fancy, 
holding that all feeling should be proportioned to the 
real qualities of its object, and forgetting that it can- 
not overpass the gulf between the created and the 
Creator, and expand itself to literal infinitude, con- 
demned the expression as false and profane. Perhaps 
each was right, except in condemning the notions of 
the other. Happily, religion has its affinities with 
the whole soul, and there is no faculty incapable of 
worship. One mind is affected by conceptions of 
immeasurable space and time, another by ideas of 
life and change : one prefers the blank, great truth, 
another the single and moving instance : one to go 
forth and seek the object of its adoration in fields be- 
yond the solar light, another to bring his image home, 
and feel him in the closet or in the mind : one, when 
standing before the invisible, may love to look into 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 41 

the deep background of infinity which lies behind 
created things; another, to gaze on the beautiful 
forms of reality, sketched on its dark surface, and 
take them as types of what lies in the depth. Why 
limit the modes of devotional conception? Why 
say to any emotions or any thoughts, " You shall 
not worship," to any desires, u You shall not pray " ? 
There can be no proprieties here. Prayer is no more 
than the utterance, the irrepressible utterance, of the 
affections which most adorn and dignify human na- 
ture ; it is the soul's act in laying itself consciously 
open at the feet of God ; it is the gush of tenderness 
with which the spirit pours forth its burning emo- 
tions of veneration and love; it is the joy, or the 
agony, or the shame of placing the mind as it is, in 
contact with the great parent mind, that its sins 
may become clearer, its wants more craving, that its 
life may be quickened, and its sympathies refreshed. 
This is the end, this the temper of piety ; every thing 
else is but its instrument ; and that mode of thought 
and expression which is truest to each individual 
mind, must be that mind's best vehicle of devotion. 

But however little of apparent glow there might 
be in Dr. Priestley's piety, it was, like everything else 
in his nature, sincere and true ; and it conducted him 
with a moral dignity, sometimes reaching the high- 
est kind of greatness, through a life of no ordinary 
vicissitude. It is difficult, even at this distance of 
time, in the quiet of one's study, with abundant 
proofs that better times have set in, nay, in immedi- 
ate view of ten Irish bishops and church-rates disap- 
pearing under the ministerial extinguisher, to read 
4* 



42 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

the history of the Birmingham riots with due com- 
posure. And yet the great sufferer himself, the 
pastor driven from his flock, the author despoiled of 
his manuscripts, the toil of years, the philosopher 
almost within hearing of the crash of his apparatus, 
the philanthropist hunted for his noble sympathy 
with his race, the man robbed of his social rights, 
uplifts amid the violence a front of unbroken, yet 
not cold magnanimity. Indeed, it is this very calm- 
ness, so instantaneous, so unlabored, so utterly free 
from stoicism, far more than the mere exhibition of 
suffering, that is most affecting in this narrative. 
There is an evident simplicity and fidelity in his de- 
lineation of his own state of mind which inspires one 
with that most delightful feeling, — perfect faith in a 
fellow-being. There is no excitement ; the deeps of 
his nature were stirred, but they were only freshened, 
not thrown into storm : there is no exaggeration, no 
consciousness of being an object of interest, no en- 
durance for the sake of setting an example, no sec- 
tarian triumph secretly exclaiming, " See what my 
principles can do " : the same sentiments of sublime 
necessarian piety, the same indignation quelled in 
the faith that present evil is the index that points to 
future good, the same compassion for those who 
wronged him, neither mawkish nor haughty, which 
appear in his replies to public addresses, appear also, 
and with just the same prominence, in his careless 
and familiar letters. It was obvious that in all times 
past he had been faithful to his scheme of Christian 
philosophy, and deeply imbedded in his mind and 
heart every principle which his judgment had led him 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 43 

to advocate. And he lived to afford a long fulfil- 
ment to his own prediction of the efficacy of his faith. 
After lingering in England long enough to follow to 
the grave his tried friend, Dr. Price, to see other as- 
sociates fast falling around him, to find himself 
shunned by the society which represented the science 
of his country, and whose records he had enriched 
by his discoveries, to be wearied by ceaseless calum- 
nies in the senate and from the press, and feel that 
here was no home for himself or his children : on the 
confines of old age, he went forth to die in the land 
on whose promised destinies his eye, ever brightened 
by the hopes of humanity, had long been fixed ; 
deeming it happier to live a stranger on the shores 
of liberty, than be dependent on the tender mercy 
of tyrants for a footing on his native soil. There, in 
one of its remoter recesses, on the outer margin of 
civilization, he, who had made a part of the world's 
briskest activity, who had led on the speed of its 
progress, whose mind had kept pace with its learn- 
ing, and overtaken its science, and outstripped its 
freedom and its morality, gathered together his re- 
sources of philosophy and devotion ; thence he looked 
forth on the vicissitudes and prospects of Europe, 
with melancholy but hopeful interest, like the proph- 
et from his mount on the land whose glories he was 
not to see. But it was not for such an energetic 
spirit as his to pass instantaneously into the quietude 
of exile without an irrecoverable shock. He had not 
that dreamy and idle pietism which could enwrap 
itself in the mists of its own contemplations, and be- 
lieve heaven nearer in proportion as earth became 



44 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

less distinct. The shifting sights and busy murmurs 
that reached him from afar, reminded him of the 
circulation of social toils which had plied his hand 
and heart. Year after year passed on, and brought 
him no summons of duty back into the stir of men : 
all that he did he had to devise and execute by his 
own solitary energies, apart from advice and sympa- 
thy, and with no hope but that of benefiting the 
world he was soon to quit. The effort to exchange 
the habits of the city for those of the cloister was 
astonishingly successful. But his mind was never 
the same again ; it is impossible not to perceive a 
decline of power, a tendency to garrulity of style and 
eccentricity of speculation in his American publica- 
tions. And yet, while this slight though perceptible 
shade fell upon his intellect, a softened light seemed 
to spread itself over his character. His feelings, his 
moral perceptions, were mellowed and ripened by 
years, and assumed a tenderness and refinement not 
observable before. Thanks to the genial and heav- 
enly clime which Christianity sheds around the soul, 
the aged stem burst into blossom. And so it will 
always be when the mind is pervaded by a faith as 
real as Priestley's. There is no law of nature, there 
are no frosts of time, to shed a snow-blight on the 
heart. The feelings die out, when their objects come 
to an end ; and if there be no future, and the aims 
of life become shorter and shorter, and its treasures 
drop off, and its attractions are spent, and a few links 
only of its hours remain in the hand, well may there 
be no heart for effort and no eye for beauty, and well 
may love gather itself up to die. But open perfec- 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 45 

tion to its veneration, and immortality to its step ; 
tell it of one who is and will always be the inspire! 
of genius, the originator of truth, the life of emotion; 
assure it that all which is loved shall live for ever, that 
that which is known shall enlarge for ever, that all 
which is felt shall grow intenser for ever ; — and the 
proximity to death will quicken instead of withering 
the mind ; the eye will grow dim on the open page 
of knowledge ; the hand will be found clasping in 
death the instruments of human good ; the heart's 
last pulse will beat with some new emotion of benig- 
nity. In Priestley's case there was not merely a sus- 
tainment, but a positive advancement of character in 
later years. The symptoms of restlessness gradually 
disappear without abatement of his activity; a qui- 
etude as of one who waits and listens comes over 
him ; there are touches of sentiment and traces of 
tears in his letters, and yet an obvious increase of 
serenity and hope ; there is a disposition to devise 
and accomplish more good for the world, and ply 
himself while an energy remained, and yet no anxi- 
ety to do what was beyond his powers. He succes- 
sively followed to the grave a son and a wife ; and 
the more he was left alone, the more did he learn to 
love to be alone ; and in his study, surrounded by 
the books which had been his companions through 
half a century and over half the earth, and sitting be- 
neath the pictures of friends under the turf, he took 
his last survey of the world which had given him so 
long a shelter : like a grateful guest before his depart- 
ure, he numbered up the bright' and social or the ad- 
venturous hours which had passed during his stay ; 



46 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

and the philosophers who had welcomed him in his 
annual visits to London, the broad, sagacious face 
of Franklin, the benignant intelligence of Price, 
rose up before him, and the social voices of the 
group of heretics round the fireside of Essex Street 
floated on his ear ; and, as the full moon shone upon 
his table, and glistened in his electrical machine, his 
eye would dream of the dining philosophers of the 
Lunar Society, and light up to greet again the 
doughty features of Darwin, and the clear, calculat- 
ing eye of Watt. Yet his retrospective thoughts 
were but hints to suggest a train of prospective far 
more interesting. The scenes which he loved were 
in the past, but most of the objects that clothed 
them with associations of interest were already trans- 
ferred to the future ; there they were in reserve for 
him, to be recovered (to use his own favorite phrase, 
slightly tinged with the melancholy spirit of his soli- 
tude) " under more favorable circumstances " ; and 
thither, with all his attachment to the world whose 
last cliffs he had reached, and whose boundary ocean 
already murmured beneath, he hoped soon to emi- 
grate. 

There are few dispositions of which society ex- 
hibits rarer practical traces than the love of truth. 
There is abundance of profession ; but the more the 
profession, the less the reality. Where the feeling 
is genuine, truth is the mind's vernacular language ; 
and to give grave notice of an intention to utter it 
would be as absurd as if an advocate, on rising, 
were to say to the jury, " Gentlemen, I most sol- 
emnly assure you, that in what I am about to lay 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 47 

before you I mean to speak English." In propor- 
tion as faith in truth becomes more common, it will 
cease to be matter of pretension. Were we to des- 
ignate Dr. Priestley in one word, that word would 
be "truth"; it would correctly describe the employ- 
ment of his intellect, the essential feeling of his 
heart, the first axiom of his morality, and even the 
impression of his outward deportment. He had 
none of that reckless sportiveness which makes play- 
things of opinions, and, for an hour's amusement, 
looks in at them, and turns them about, like the 
beads of a kaleidoscope, watching what fantastical 
shapes they may be made to assume. He had no 
sympathy with the sceptical philosophy which sees 
nothing but error in all human speculation, nothing 
but " sick men's dreams " in the mutations of opin- 
ion. That there is such a thing as truth, that it is 
not placed beyond the reach of the human under- 
standing, and that, when found, it is necessarily a 
pure good, were the first principles of his faith ; prin- 
ciples which he did not promulgate in their general 
form, and then reject in their applications, but car- 
ried out boldly, and without reserve, into every topic 
which invited his research. So utterly untrue is it 
that he had a passion for unsettling convictions, and 
then leaving the mind in a state of fluctuation, that 
if he committed any marked fault in the conduct of 
investigation, it was this; — that he recognized no 
other posture of the understanding in reference to 
the subject of its inquiry than assent and dissent; 
that the intermediate state of doubt he disowned, 
except as a means of transition to one of the other 



48 



MARTINEAlj's MISCELLANIES. 



two ; and overlooked the fact, that, as there may be 
questions in which the conflicting evidence is accu- 
rately balanced, there may be occasions on which, in 
the present condition of human knowledge, sus- 
pense is the appropriate feeling. His tendency was 
much more to dogmatize than to doubt ; a dogma- 
tism, however, which, if occasionally appearing after 
investigation, never manifested itself before. With 
this limitation, his impartiality was unimpeachable. 
That his inquiry must lead to the positive discovery 
of truth or falsehood was certainly a species of pre- 
judgment ; but it could not determine him unfairly 
towards either of two antagonist opinions ; it could 
only preclude from the rejection of both. In his 
comparison of the opposing claims of evidence, his 
faith in truth never deserted him ; altogether annihi- 
lating the influence of his previous impressions, and 
not even allowing them a presumption of innocence 
till proved to be guilty. His versatility of associa- 
tion rendered alterations of belief easier to him than 
to others : his feelings were not adhesive ; they could 
without violence be transferred from one class of 
sentiments to another ; and accordingly, even to the 
period of life when old impressions become indu- 
rated, and the emotions tardy of change, he was 
continually modifying his convictions, adopting new 
views with a facility truly . wonderful, quickening 
them with life, and carrying them out to their re- 
moter consequences with energy and fearlessness. 
His defence of the doctrine of phlogiston, when dis- 
carded by all other philosophers, is the solitary in- 
stance in his life of prejudiced tenacity of opinion ; 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 49 

and this was evinced in the decline of life, when 
even to him the difficulty must have been great of 
admitting a new theory, and applying it to the solu- 
tion of facts which had been regarded as otherwise 
explained, and when, moreover, his attention had 
ceased to be actively directed to chemical inquiries. 
Any one who is aware how much the very memory 
of facts by the mind is dependent on the hypothesis 
which has been employed as the principle of their 
arrangement, or even as the guide to their discovery, 
will be disposed to treat this error rather as interest- 
ing to the mental philosopher, than as justifying the 
severity of the critic. The spirit of freedom and of 
faith which conducted him through his private inqui- 
ries, he carried out into his publication of their re- 
sults. Ingenuous to himself, he was equally ingenu- 
ous to the world. He saw through the contemptible 
fallacies by which worldliness and imbecility would 
defend the suppression of opinions ; ease, popularity, 
sectarian prosperity, he held to be bawbles compared 
with the duty of individual thought and speech, and 
sins if purchased at its expense. Not even could 
he think his task to society performed when he had 
stated and recommended the truths which he seemed 
to have reached : he lays before the world the whole 
process of his own mind; tells his difficulties, his 
failures, his false inferences, the hypotheses which 
misled as well as those which aided him ; so that if 
his thoughts had fallen into type as they arose, they 
could scarcely have been more distinct. Hence he 
excelled much more in analytical than in synthetical 
composition, and seldom attempted the latter with- 
5 



50 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

out sliding continually into the former. And what- 
ever may be thought of their relative merits, regard- 
ed as methods of direct instruction, it cannot be 
doubted that the successful investigator, who has the 
honesty to write analytically, bequeathes in this pic- 
ture of his own intellect an invaluable guide to 
future inquirers in the same field, and a most inter- 
esting study to the observer of the human mind. 

In nothing did Dr. Priestley's mental and moral 
freedom more nobly manifest itself than in his well- 
proportioned love of truth. With all his diversity of 
pursuit, he did not think all truth of equal impor- 
tance, or deem the diffusion of useful knowledge an 
excuse for withholding the more useful. With all 
his ardor of mind, he did not look at an object till 
he saw nothing else, and it became his universe. He 
made his estimate deliberately; and he was not to 
be dazzled, or flattered, or laughed out of it. In his 
laboratory, he thought no better of chemistry than 
in his pulpit ; and in the drawing-rooms of the 
French Academicians, no worse of Christianity than 
by the firesides of his own flock. He was never 
anxious to appear in either less or more than his real 
character. Even at the time when his name was 
most illustrious, and his associations the most close 
with the atheistical philosophers of the Continent ; 
when he was courted by the revolutionists of Eng- 
land, when, by the persecution and desertion of all 
others, he was more especially thrown upon the 
sympathy of those men, and a noble and fascinating 
sympathy it was ; when they urged him to quit the 
" unfruitful fields of polemical divinity, and cultivate 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 51 

the philosophy of which he was the father," and 
promised him thus an eternal fame; — he assures 
them that he esteems his theology of far greater im- 
portance to mankind than his science, and risks his 
reputation at its height, by making it the vehicle to 
carry the great principles of religion before the 
almost inaccessible mind of the sceptics of France : 
perceiving the affinities and analogies which subsist- 
ed between the different departments of human 
knowledge, he did not desire to divorce them in his 
own mind, and derive a separate character from each. 
His philosophy is replete with faith, and his faith 
with philosophy ; his conceptions of the Creator aid 
him in deciphering the creation ; and every discovery 
in creation contributes a new element to his ideas of 
the Creator. The changes of the universe are the 
movements of God ; and he that contemplates them 
without reference to the mind of which they are ex- 
pressive, might as well study the laws of human 
action in the gestures of an automaton. 

It is impossible to make human character a study 
without being tempted to speculate on the causes of 
the marvellous varieties which it exhibits. That 
those causes are not all external to the mind, scarcely 
admits of a doubt ; and so difficult is it to define, or 
even to conjecture, those which are inherent in the 
mental constitution, that the philosophy of individual 
character can hardly be said to have any existence. 
Priestley was an adherent of that school by which 
all the phenomena of mind, whether intellectual or 
moral, were resolved into cases of the law of associ- 
ation; but why the law in question, operating on 



52 



MARTINEAU S MISCELLANIES. 



the ideas furnished by sensation, should produce 
results so much more widely divergent from each 
other than are the external circumstances of man- 
kind, is a problem very embarrassing to the resources 
of this doctrine. Perhaps more might be explained 
by original differences of sensibility than is com- 
monly imagined. Were it true that the affections 
are the results of pleasurable and painful associa- 
tions, that desire is simply the idea of a pleasure, 
and aversion the idea of a pain, it would follow 
that the vividness of the affections, the strength of 
the desires, and aversions must depend on the viv- 
idness of the primary sensation; in other words, 
that the warmth of the moral part of human na- 
ture must vary with the degree of original sensi- 
bility. 

In this explanation, however, it is evident that no 
reason is involved, accounting for the relative promi- 
nence of the several moral faculties ; it is only their 
absolute strength, the amount of fervor and enthusi- 
asm, which would be explained. Possibly, however, 
the theory might be carried further, so as to provide 
an adequate cause for several intellectual peculiari- 
ties. The sensations supposed to form the elements 
of all knowledge are received either simultaneously 
or successively : when several are received simultane- 
ously, as the smell, the taste,, the color, the form, &c, 
of a fruit, their association together constitutes, ac- 
cording to this theory, our idea of an object ; when 
received successively, their association makes up the 
idea of an event Any thing, then, which should 
javor the associations of synchronous ideas, would 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 53 

tend to produce a knowledge of objects, a perception 
of qualities ; while any thing which should favor 
association in the successive order would tend to 
produce a knowledge of events, of the order of 
occurrences, and of the connection of cause and 
effect : in other words, in the one case a perceptive 
mind, with a discriminative feeling of the pleasura- 
ble and painful properties of things, a sense of the 
grand and the beautiful, would be the result ; in the 
other, a mind attentive to the movements and phe- 
nomena, a ratiocinative and philosophic intellect. 
Now it is an acknowledged principle in the philos- 
ophy of suggestion, that all sensations experienced 
during the presence of any vivid impression become 
strongly associated with it, and with each other ; 
and does it not follow, that the synchronous feelings 
of a sensitive constitution (i. e. the one which has 
vivid impressions) will be more intimately blended 
than in a differently formed mind? This sugges- 
tion involves an inference which might serve to verify 
or refute it ; that where nature has endowed an indi- 
vidual with great original susceptibility, he will prob- 
ably be distinguished by fondness for natural history, 
a relish for the beautiful and great, and moral enthu- 
siasm; where there is but a mediocrity of sensi- 
bility, a love of science, of abstract truth, with a 
deficiency of taste and of fervor, is likely to be the 
result. 

Might not many of Dr. Priestley's characteristics 

be traced, in consistency with his own philosophy, 

to such an original mediocrity of sensibility ? — his 

want of memory, to a deficient vividness in the asso- 

5* 



54 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

ciated ideas ? — his versatility and rapidity of asso- 
ciation, to the absence of any strong concentrative 
emotion tending to arrest his thoughts at any point 
in a train, and to forbid them to pass on? — the 
direction of his analogical power towards philosophi- 
cal invention, rather than poetical imagination, to 
his want of perception of the beautiful ? — his even- 
ness of temper and spirits, to a freedom from that 
alternate action and reaction to which susceptible 
minds are liable ? Perhaps even the inability which 
he mentions to do any thing when hurried, might 
admit of a similar explanation. For what is the 
feeling of hurry, but a belief that an unusual exer- 
cise of vigor, a great gathering of power, must be 
put in requisition, in order to accomplish some de- 
sired object? And one whose uniformity of tem- 
perament gives no experience of such occasional 
expansion of power has no faith in its possibility, or 
its effect : and hence he despairs, when the man of 
impulse becomes inspired. We throw out these 
brief hints with great diffidence, for the consideration 
of those who feel the defects, and would improve the 
resources, of the association-philosophy ; they can be 
of no further use, than to suggest something better 
than themselves to more competent thinkers. Our 
main object in the remarks which have been made 
on Priestley has been, to revive the memory of a 
great man, at a period more favorable than any since 
his death to a just estimate of his character; to 
furnish a faithful delineation of his whole mind ; to 
aid in determining his true position among the bene- 
factors of mankind; and define his claims on the 



DR. PRIESTLEY. 55 

veneration of his country. If we have in any de- 
gree succeeded in these objects, it will be no slight 
satisfaction to have performed some little part of 
the act of posthumous justice due from this gen- 
eration. 



THE LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF 
THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D.* 

[From the Prospective Keview for February, 1845.] 

In the preparation of these volumes Mr. Stanley 
had to perform a sad and solemn task. To present 
to the world the last glimpse of one who had been 
its benefactor, is at all times a melancholy office. 
But it is a bitter grief to do this for one whose past 
performance, admirable in itself, was less great than 
his future promise, and on whom men looked as yet 
with expectant, rather than with grateful eye. Eng- 
land was not prepared to lose Arnold ; and finds it 
hard to accept his final image from his biographer, 
in place of much fruitful work from himself. Under 
the pressure of occupations that would exhaust the 
energy of ordinary men, he had not only meditated, 
but in part achieved, a system of designs by which 
the historical, philosophical, and Christian literature 
of his country would have been permanently en- 
riched, and the spirit of its social life sensibly ele- 

, „ 

* The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D. D., late Head 
Master of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of Modern History in 
the University of Oxford. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, M. A., Fellow 
and Tutor of University College, Oxford. In two Yolumes. Fellowes. 
1844. 



DR. ARNOLD. 57 

vated. Just as he was raised into a position prom- 
ising to render his industry and enthusiasm most 
rapidly productive, he has vanished from our hopes ; 
and instead of those priceless stores of uncommuni- 
cated wisdom, the leaves casually scattered from his 
table are gathered together, and presented as his last 
memorial. In the midst of the third act the curtain 
has suddenly dropped ; and rises only to show us the 
noble form, lately kindling with humane and earnest 
speech, now stretched in the silence of death. 

Happily, however, it is only in the case of ordinary 
men that the value of a life can be measured by its 
quantity. The almost infinite worth to us of such a 
mind as Arnold's depends upon its quality ; and if it 
only remains and toils in our midst long enough to 
show us the spirit and manner of its work, its high- 
est function is performed. Let the deep game of 
life be played with a divine skill, and we must not 
complain though the calculable stake which is won 
in our behalf be only nominal. However great the 
loss of Arnold's Roman History, it is as nothing to 
the wealth he leaves us in this Biography. From 
what a good man does there is no higher lesson to 
be learned than what he is ; his workmanship inter- 
ests and profits us as an expression of himself, and 
would become dead and indifferent to us, if, instead 
of being a human creation, it were the product of 
some mechanical necessity. That Arnold has lived, 
and shown how much nobleness and strength may 
maintain itself in an age of falsehood, negligence, 
and pretence, — with this let us rest and be thank- 
ful. 



58 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

The work before us is essentially an autobiogra- 
phy. The letters, which form its chief portion, ex- 
tend from the year 1817 to 1842 : and they present 
so vivid and complete an impression of the writer 
throughout the changes of his career, and the ripen- 
ing of his character, that little occasion remained for 
their editor to appear as an original biographer. He 
has had the rare modesty and merit to perceive this ; 
and in the chapters of his own, by which we are in- 
troduced to the several periods of the correspond- 
ence, every thing is kept in strict subordination to 
the legitimate purpose of the book: he evidently 
had no desire but to make us know the subject of 
his Memoirs ; and the affectionate singleness of his 
aim was itself an adequate security for tact and suc- 
cess in its accomplishment. There are indeed traces 
of abstinence and self-restraint in the treatment of 
his materials, for which we honor him. Nothing 
would have been easier than to have created private 
heart-burnings and sectarian animosities by the indis- 
creet use of such letters as Arnold's ; — letters full of 
reference to every controversy of the day, and passing 
the freest judgment on most of the conspicuous 
actors in Church or State. Mr. Stanley's good taste 
has conducted him wisely through a very delicate 
task. If we were disposed to find any fault with its 
execution, we should complain that he has not told 
us more of the personal habits and minuter traits 
which so materially help us to conceive the physi- 
ognomy of a character. The few things of this 
kind which he has given us constitute most delight- 
ful elements in our image of Arnold ; — his sofa full 



DR. ARNOLD. 59 

of books, his boyish play, his daily walk beside the 
pony, his mountaineering rambles ; and we would 
fain have known his time of rising and of rest, the 
distribution of his hours, his method of study and 
composition, his love or disregard of external order, 
and such other trivial particulars as might complete 
the lineaments of his familiar life. Details of this 
kind, always full of expressiveness, are especially 
needed in a Life, the interest of which is that of 
portraiture, not of history. There is an entire ab- 
sence from this biography of all outward incident 
and adventure. Even the ordinary struggles are 
wanting, through which men of thought and ca- 
pacity, wrestling with poverty, or restrained by the 
singularities of their own genius, finally establish 
themselves in a professional career. There is not a 
single passage of suffering, — not a momentary crisis 
of difficulty, — nothing like a dramatic attitude of 
events, from the opening to the close. Arnold's way 
was quietly opened before him from year to year, 
and he had only to occupy the successive positions 
into which the most commonplace external causes 
threw him. At no time was it his task to choose a 
lot, with the world before him ; but, what is more 
difficult, to travel on a routine path, without con- 
tracting the routine spirit, to keep the high-road of 
life, unsoiled by its dust, unexhausted by its heat, 
and pressing on to the last with all the freshness of 
an explorer. He was one who could be a hero with- 
out romance. To him " the narrow way that lead- 
eth unto life " was no mountain by-path of exist- 
ence, but just the personal track each faithful pilgrim 



60 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

may pursue (though few, alas ! there be that find it) 
on the same "broad road" by which many pass to 
their destruction. 

It has been remarked, that a large proportion of 
the men who have obtained distinction in the world 
have been the last members of a large, or, as the 
Irish expressively term it, a long" family. Among 
the English aristocracy this is the natural conse- 
quence of the law of primogeniture, and the prac- 
tices connected with it, which throw the younger 
sons into professions requiring, for their successful 
exercise, a healthy culture of personal qualities. In 
the middle class it must arise from the less anxious 
and elaborate care, the freer hand usually applied by 
parents to their latest than to their earliest charge. 
There is thus a larger proportion of self-formation 
in the character, and the natural forces of the mind, 
exempt from the repression of system, display them- 
selves, with less perhaps of the harmony that con- 
stitutes personal well-being, but with more of the 
strength which makes them effective on society. 
Arnold, the seventh child in a family early orphaned, 
was no exception to this rule. From childhood his 
mind seems to have been directed, rather than con- 
strained ; and, even during the eight years spent at 
Warminster and Winchester schools, to have indi- 
cated that eager and exclusive interest in every thing 
human, which at once disqualified him for eminence 
in Philology, in Science, in Metaphysics, and consti- 
tuted his greatness as an Historian, a Politician, and 
a Divine. Ballad poetry, dramatic representation, 
history, and geography, every thing which brought 



DR. ARNOLD. 61 

before his conception life and its scenery, had irre- 
sistible attractions even for his boyhood. With 
what remarkable tact this sympathy enabled him to 
detect what was untrue to nature in the legends of 
nations, is manifest from the following sentence, 
written when he was fourteen years old : — "I verily 
believe, that half at least of the Roman history is, 
if not totally false, at least scandalously exagger- 
ated : how far different are the modest, unaffected, 
and impartial narrations of Herodotus, Thucydides, 
and Xenophon." (Vol. I. p. 5.) 

His studies at Oxford tended to confirm his Real- 
ism of character. The neglect prevailing there of 
all formal science, with exception of the Deductive 
Logic, and the ascendant influence of Aristotle 
among the great masters of thought, and Thucyd- 
ides among the models of history, combined with 
the vehement state controversies of the day, and the 
exciting progress of the Peninsular war, to engage 
his enthusiasm with practical questions of society 
and government, and to strengthen his inaptitude for 
poetical or speculative thought. In the private 
friendships, indeed, which he formed in the little circle 
of Corpus Christi, there was much to counteract the 
objective and prosaic cast of his character ; his love 
especially for Keble and Mr. (now Justice) Coleridge, 
brought him under the influence of two minds, both 
of great richness, whose highest qualities formed the 
complement to his own. The first reverence with 
which an affectionate spirit looks up to one who is 
strong where it is weak, and light where it is dark, 
is often the birth-hour of its deep religious life : the 
6 



62 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

throbbing vital action in which the soul opens its 
chrysalis of sleepy and stationary habit, and assumes 
its free and winged state, amid the sunshine and the 
air of heaven. So it seems to us to have been with 
Arnold. His understanding was too robust, and his 
moral affections too decided, to be turned from their 
natural direction by any external agency; but his 
college attachments mingled an element of humility 
and devotion with a mental activity else too hardy 
and dogmatical ; gave him the feeling of a sphere of 
truth and beauty different from his own ; and habitu- 
ated his mind to that upward look of trust and won- 
der, which is not indeed piety itself, but is as truly 
its genuine antecedent, as the raised hat and sub- 
dued footfall on entering a church are the natural 
prelude to the hour of prayer and aspiration. The 
influence of these associates, however, though touch- 
ingly referred to in later years, was imperfectly ac- 
knowledged at the time; the external form of his 
opinions and the habits of his intellect seemed to be 
engaged in constantly withstanding it. He was 
characterized by a vehement, and even disputatious 
independence ; he apparently adhered to his utilita- 
rian, rather than aesthetic estimate of the studies 
and attainments of the place ; insensible to the 
beauty of the Greek drama, which was too much a 
beauty of form to please a perception fond of the 
depth of human coloring, and slighting refined and 
fastidious scholarship, on the plea of preferring the 
study of things to that of words. Yet he entered 
his college a Jacobin, and quitted it a high Tory : 
he became a convert to the rigorous discipline by 



DR. ARNOLD. 63 

which a taste for philological niceties is formed ; he 
permitted his theological doubts to be overawed and 
stifled by the remonstrance which Mr. Keble ad- 
dressed, not to his reason, but to his fears and his 
affections; and in other ways gave symptoms of 
being now, for the first time, subdued into an appre- 
hension of a wisdom not his own, and led by the 
power of an unconscious deference. Indeed, with 
some apparent dogmatism, Arnold appears from this 
time to have been exceedingly susceptible of influ- 
ence from any man " rich in the combined and indi- 
visible love of truth and goodness." No sooner did 
he exchange the society of Corpus Christi for that 
of Oriel, on his election to his fellowship, than a 
fresh series of changes became apparent in his views : 
in the presence of Davison, Copplestone, "Whately, 
he felt the irresistible action of a new intellectual 
climate ; and the seeds of all his characteristic be- 
liefs, productive afterwards of fruit so wholesome, 
rapidly germinated and struck root. His abhorrence 
of sacerdotal religion, his conception of a Christian 
7roXtTeia, his appreciation of the origin in human na- 
ture, and dangers in human society, of Conservation 
on the one hand and Jacobinism on the other, all 
date from the time of his connection with Oriel : 
and much of the character of his future works is, 
perhaps, referable to the fact, that their materials 
were mainly collected during this period, and were 
results of his reading in the Oxford libraries, whilst 
he was in the enjoyment of his fellowship. Even 
where his subsequent opinions deviated from the 
standard of the Oriel school of liberal divines, we 



64 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

may trace the operation of a new influence ; his 
veneration for Niebuhr and Bunsen completing the 
elevation of that structure of conviction of which 
the ground-plan had been traced in intimacy with 
Whately; and imparting an historic richness and 
Gothic sanctity to a system of thought having its 
foundations in philosophy. To this succession of 
admirations and their powerful but healthful agency 
upon him, he beautifully alludes in a letter to Mr. 
Justice Coleridge, apparently justifying himself from 
the charge of a presumptuous mental independence. 
The date is January 26th, 1840. 

" Your letter interested me very deeply, and I have 
thought over what you say very often. Yet I believe that 
no man's mind has ever been more consciously influenced 
by others than mine has been in the course of my life, 
from the time that I first met you at Corpus. I doubt 
whether you ever submitted to another with the same com- 
plete deference as I did to you when I was an undergradu- 
ate. So, afterwards, I looked up to Davison with exceed- 
ing reverence, — and to Whately. Nor do I think that 
Keble himself has lived on in more habitual respect and 
admiration than I have, only the objects of these feelings 
have been very different. At this day I could sit at Bun- 
sen's feet and drink in wisdom with almost intense rever- 
ence. But I cannot reverence the men that Keble rever- 
ences, and how does he feel to Luther and Milton ? It 
gives me no pain and no scruple whatever to differ from 
those whom, after the most deliberate judgment that I can 
form, I cannot find to be worthy of admiration. Nor does 
their number affect me, when all are manifestly under the 
same influences, and no one seems to be a master-spirit, 
fitted to lead amongst men. But with wise men in the way 



DR. ARNOLD. 65 

of their wisdom, it would give me very great pain to differ ; 
I can say that truly with regard to your uncle, even more 

with regard to Niebuhr 

" I was brought up in a strong Tory family ; the first 
impressions of my own mind shook my merely received 
impressions to pieces, and at Winchester I was wellnigh a 
Jacobin. At sixteen, when I went up to Oxford, all the in- 
fluences of the place which I loved exceedingly, your influ- 
ence above all, blew my Jacobinism to pieces, and made me 
again a Tory. I used to speak strong Toryism to the old 
Attic Society, and greedily did I read Clarendon with all 
the sympathy of a thorough royalist. Then came the 
Peace, when Napoleon was put down, and the Tories had it 
their own way. Nothing shook my Toryism more than the 

strong Tory sentiments that I used to hear at , though 

I liked the family exceedingly. But I heard language at 
which my organ of justice stood aghast, and which, the 
more I read of the Bible, seemed to me more and more un- 
christian. I could not but go on inquiring, and I do feel 
thankful that now for some years past I have been living, 
not in scepticism, but in a very sincere faith which embraces 
most unreservedly those great truths, divine and human, 
which the highest authorities, divine and human, seem con- 
curringly to teach." — Vol. II. p. 190. 

There is one instance in which this openness to 
persuasion through his affections appears to us to 
have impaired the simplicity and clearness of Ar- 
nold's conscience. We say this with absolute sor- 
row of a man whose memory we love with devotion 
almost unreserved. We say it with self-distrust, 
because conscious that, in bringing a charge of doc- 
trinal partiality, we may not ourselves be sufficiently 
without sin to cast the first stone. Still, we cannot 
6* 



66 



MARTINEAITS MISCELLANIES. 



satisfy ourselves that Arnold got rid of his doubts 
about the Trinity by fair means : and in the advice 
given to him on the subject, we see so much of the 
mischievous sophistry and dishonest morality cur- 
rent on these matters among divines, that we feel 
bound to enter our protest as we pass. When he 
was about to resign his fellowship and take orders, 
previous to his marriage, he found his course em- 
barrassed by doubts as to the doctrine of the Trinity. 
With the moral clearness and simplicity which inva- 
riably distinguished his natural judgments, he was 
willing to accept the doubt as a voice of God, and 
make a reverent pause in his career, while he listened 
to it, and pondered its intimations. But he was sur- 
rounded by associates who were incapable of appre- 
ciating such a state of mind, — who lifted their 
hands in pious horror at his perplexity, and treated 
it as the first coil of the old serpent lurking, as of 
old, in the path of a guilty curiosity. How little 
sympathy, and how much misdirection, he met with 
at this trying crisis of his life, will be apparent from 
the following passage of a letter, addressed (evi- 
dently by Keble) to Mr. Justice Coleridge, February 
14th, 1819: — 

" I have not talked with Arnold lately on the distressing 
thoughts which he wrote to you about, but I am fearful, 
from his manner at times, that he has by no means got rid 
of them, though I feel quite confident that all will be well 
in the end. The subject of them is that most awful one, 
on which all very inquisitive, reasoning minds are, I believe, 
most liable to such temptations, — I mean the doctrine of 
the blessed Trinity. Do not start, my dear Coleridge : I do 



DR. ARNOLD. 67 

not believe that Arnold has serious scruples of the under- 
standing about it, but it is a defect of his mind, that he 
cannot get rid of a certain feeling of objections, — and par- 
ticularly when, as he fancies, the bias is so strong upon him 
to decide one way from interest : he scruples doing what I 
advise him, which is, to put down the objections by main 
force, whenever they arise in his mind, fearful that in so 
doing he shall be violating his conscience for a mainte- 
nance' sake. I am still inclined to think with you, that the 
wisest thing he could do would be to take John M. (a 
young pupil whom I was desirous of placing under his 
care) and a curacy somewhere or other, and cure himself, 
not by physic, i. e. reading and controversy, but by diet and 
regimen, i. e. holy living." — Vol. I. p. 21. 

The sacerdotal sophistry of this letter is so com- 
plete and characteristic, that the subsequent career 
of the writer seems to be almost prefigured in it. 
To quench by the " main force " of an idolatrous 
reverence the truthful aspirations of a holy spirit, 
and suppress the starts of a waking conscience by 
the hideous nightmare of church power, is the grand 
aim of the school to which he belongs ; and the per- 
verseness with which he here designates the purest 
sincerity as " a defect of Arnold's mind," counsels a 
sceptical man to " take a curacy " in order to believe 
the doctrines he is to teach, and calls the dishonest 
stifling of thought in action " holy living," is singu- 
larly symptomatic of the moral blindness to which 
superstition inevitably tends. We are far from de- 
nying that there are cases of embarrassed thought, 
in which the advice here given would be the best, 
and the only cure must be sought in active duty, 



68 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

not in lonely meditation. We admit the error of 
treating all sorts of doubt indiscriminately as mere 
affairs of the intellect, determinable by pure reason- 
ing, and equally possible to every condition of the 
character and will. Unquestionably, the effect upon 
a man of what is called " evidence " depends, in sub- 
jects of a moral nature, not less upon the suscepti- 
bility of his conscience and affections, than on the 
acuteness of his understanding: and any one who 
forbids us ever to judge others by their belief, and 
requires from us an equal sympathy for all states of 
mind consistent with good conduct, is deluded by 
the cant of a philosophy which he himself neither 
does nor can reduce to practice. There is no more 
full and direct expression of a man's whole mind 
than the faith by which he lives ; and by this, bet- 
ter than by any single symptom, do we know one 
another, and keep apart in strangeness, or draw to- 
gether in love. But there is a distinction to be 
drawn between spiritual and simply historical relig- 
ion, — and between doubts arising from spiritual ob- 
tuseness, and those which are due to want of his- 
torical light. Religion, we conceive, like morals and 
physics, has first truths, which are incapable of being 
derived from any thing more certain than themselves, 
— which the human mind, at a particular point of 
its development, invariably recognizes, and the in- 
tuition of which is a direct result of the activity of 
its highest faculties. As no one without senses could 
ascertain the reality of matter, or without self-con- 
sciousness become aware of the existence of mind, 
so no one without moral perceptions and desires 



DR. ARNOLD. 69 

could learn the being or feel the presence of a God. 
Believing the knowledge of him to be in direct pro- 
portion, not to the sharpness of the intellect, but to 
the purity, depth, and earnestness of the heart, we 
can understand why a moral remedy, rather than a 
speculative discipline, should be prescribed for the 
genuine atheist, and he should be desired to do the 
Will ere he deny the Agency of God. With one 
who questions a first truth, you can do nothing but 
improve his mental aptitude for apprehending it. 
But who can affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity 
stands in this predicament ? Who can say that 
there is any condition of the character to which it 
becomes self-evident? — that the numerical analysis 
of Deity is " experimentally " revealed through the 
moral dispositions ? The doctrine, as its supporters 
are the most eager to aver, is wholly the result of 
external testimony, and on the right reading of that 
testimony depends its truth or falsehood. If it be 
said that an indisposition to receive it may arise 
from a mean repugnance to any thing wonderful 
and great, and a propensity to make every thing 
comprehensible, that we may have the less that is 
adorable, even this, which in other cases is a mis- 
representation, is in Arnold's instance inapplicable : 
for Mr. Justice Coleridge expressly assures us, that 
his doubts " were not low nor rationalistic in their 
tendency, according to the bad sense of that term : 
there was no indisposition in him to believe merely 
because the article transcended his reason ; he doubt- 
ed the proof and the interpretation of the textual 
authority." (Vol. I. p. 20.) 



70 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

How could doubts like these, not arising from de- 
ficient idealism and love, having confessedly no 
"wilful" origin, be justly treated as wicked "temp- 
tations," and legitimately resisted by prayer and 
practice ? Can a change in the moral state settle 
a question of disputed interpretation ? Will active 
life improve the exegetic skill? Will a batch of 
hard work enable a man to punctuate Timothy, ex- 
plain ap?ray/xa, and penetrate the true meaning of the 
Paraclete ? Can parish duty remove obscurity from 
the proem of John ? and a curacy demonstrate the 
Athanasian Creed ? What can be more evident than 
that the advice given to Arnold was good for stifling 
the doubt, bad for reaching the truth ? It is as if 
Mr. Justice Coleridge were to decide a question of 
law by shutting his ears (per " main force ") against 
one half the pleadings, nightly remembering the 
others in his prayers, refusing to consult his books of 
precedents, and submitting the matter to the ordeal 
of a brisk walk. Unhappily, the solemn sophistry, 
recommended by the entreaties of friendship, and 
decorated with the phrases of academical devotion, 
appears to have imposed upon Arnold. Mr. Justice 
Coleridge refers " the conclusion of these doubts " to 
a later period of his life, " when his mind had not 
become weaker, nor his pursuit of truth less honest 
or ardent, but when his abilities were matured, his 
knowledge greater, his judgment more sober." We 
know not how to avoid the obvious inference from 
this statement, that Arnold's doubts did not vanish 
till long after he had assumed the clerical office ; that 
he was ordained in the midst of them; that he 



DR. ARNOLD. 71 

signed the Articles first, and believed them after- 
wards. This indeed is painfully evident from the date 
of Mr. Keble's letter descriptive of his state of mind ; 
for at' the time when it was written, he had already- 
been in holy orders for two months, having received 
ordination in December, 1818. Are we not justi- 
fied in saying, that he admitted the influence of 
others to have an improper suffrage in matters where 
his own conscience would have been the better 
guide? What sort of "holy living" must that be, 
which, as advised by the saintliest of his friends, 
could be entered only through an inauguration of 
falsehood and pretence ? And when disingenuous- 
ness like this can be advised by Keble, practised by 
Arnold, applauded by Mr. Justice Coleridge, and 
tacitly approved by Mr. Stanley, what must we 
surmise as to the morality of opinion within the 
Church, and what value can be attached to the ap- 
parent testimony of its learning and its worth to 
the doctrines it upholds with so proud a dignity ? 

Questionable practice is the natural source of 
sophistical theory : and it is not wonderful that this 
one weak point in Arnold's life should entail a cor- 
responding unsoundness in his notions of subscrip- 
tion to articles of faith. Of this act he defended 
the lax construction by which alone he could have 
found admission into the Church ; a construction so 
lax, that his apology for it fills us with astonishment 
and shame. His doctrine and example on this point, 
recommended by his general simplicity and integrity, 
are likely to be widely injurious ; and, thrown into 
the balance against wavering principle, have already, 



72 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

we have reason to believe, determined many a youth 
to an evasive conformity. If the question could be 
submitted to the simple, veracious perceptions of a 
child, whether a man may not declare his* belief 
in some things which he disbelieves, there would 
be no fear ; the very question would be seen to be 
immoral, and one on which no argument could even 
be innocently heard. If it were submitted only to 
men of strong sense and intellect wholly unsub- 
orned, there would be no fear; they would see 
straight through the hollow ingenuities interposed to 
color and distort the truth. But there are weak, 
bewildered minds, to whom a pleasant fallacy comes 
with all the force of conviction; uneasy from the 
wish to serve two masters ; too scrupulous to make 
a deceitful profession, but ready to hear evidence in 
favor of its honesty ; shrinking from the positive ap- 
proaches of falsehood, yet looking after it with lust 
of the eye ; and these half-souls are they for whom 
Arnold's guidance in this matter is dangerous. 
With the perverseness of those who search the les- 
sons of life for justification of their weakness, rather 
than for the ennobling of their strength, they will 
appropriate the one only dishonest comfort that can 
be gathered from a good man's history ; flattering 
themselves that they are wiser by his wisdom, and 
holier by his faithfulness, they will be but partners 
in his infirmity, and victims of his mistake. 

Arnold's practical morality on the matter of sub- 
scription and confession appears from the following 
sentences : — 

" I do not believe the damnatory clauses in the Athana- 



DR. ARNOLD. 73 

sian Creed, under any qualification given of them, except 
such as substitute for them propositions of a wholly different 

character But I read the Athanasian Creed, and 

have and would again subscribe the Article about it." — 
Vol. II. p. 120. 

It is to be presumed that, in reading the Creed, 
Dr. Arnold did not omit the " damnatory clauses." 
Then he publicly pronounced a most solemn anath- 
ema of which he did not believe a word ! He as- 
serted a thing to be " above all things necessary to 
salvation," which he did not suppose to be necessary 
at all ! He warned many a hearer that " without 
doubt he should perish everlastingly," apprehending 
all the while no danger whatsoever ! Nothing surely 
but the terrible paralysis of custom could deaden a 
man's sense of the guilt of so great a mockery. 
Were he to hurry through his task lest he should be 
struck dumb in the midst, we should scarcely think 
it an unnatural superstition. Apart from all ques- 
tion as to the engagements made at his ordination, 
it is a shocking Jesuitry to maintain that a cler- 
gyman — instructor of the people's conscience and 
messenger of their prayers — need not assent to the 
promise or the curse he utters in the hour of wor- 
ship, and may innocently invite his hearers to stand 
up with him before God, and take lying judgments 
upon their lips. 

And what is the plea put forth to blunt the edge 
of our natural indignation at such laxity ? 

" I have and would again subscribe the Article about it 
[the Athanasian Creed], because I do not conceive the 
clauses in question to be essential parts of it I 

7 



74 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

do not imagine that the Article about the Creed was intend- 
ed in the least to refer to the clauses." — Vol. II. pp. 120, 
121. 

Be it so : what does this amount to but the plea, 
" I never engaged to believe these falsehoods, so why 
should I object to utter them " ? Is insincerity then 
quite allowable, except where a man has contracted 
to avoid it? And are the words of holy men to be 
no index to their minds unless a truthful intent has 
been written in the bond ? The obligation to guile- 
less veracity does not arise from ordination promises 
and doctrinal subscription, and does not stop where 
they happen to terminate. Take away Articles, sig- 
nature, vows altogether, and it is no less a duty than 
before, for a man to say only the thing he truly 
means. His added pledge is but a recognition of 
the antecedent obligation, an assurance to others 
that he owns the justice of their moral expectations, 
and has a sense of right and fidelity concurrent with 
their own. 

But let us even accept Arnold's mode of putting 
the case, and see whether Churchmen such as he can 
be justified in signing the eighth Article, which is as 
follows : — 

" The three Creeds, Nice Creed, Athanasius's Creed, and 
that which is commonly called the Apostle's Creed, ought 
thoroughly to be received and believed ; for they may be 
proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture." 

Arnold resolves the Athanasian Creed into two 
parts; one defining the doctrine of the Trinity; the 
other defining the Divine purpose with respect to 



DR. ARNOLD. 75 

unbelievers in it: the one therefore referring to the 
psychological nature, the other to the moral char- 
acter of God ; the one pronouncing on the mysteries 
of his Absolute Essence, the other on the principles 
of his Relative conduct and sentiments towards men. 
Strangely inverting the comparative importance of 
these, Arnold decides that the incomprehensible 
metaphysics are the essential part, — the intelligible 
declarations of law, the non-essential : and he argues, 
" I believe the former, I do not believe the latter ; so 
I may say that I believe the creed ' thoroughly?" 
And is there the least ground, except in the con- 
venience of half-believers, for this dismemberment of 
the Creed ? Not the slightest. The " damnatory 
clauses" are not only inseparably interwoven with 
it, beginning, middle, and end, but logically consti- 
tute the substantive affirmation of the whole docu- 
ment, of which the statement of the " Catholic 
Faith " is but a dependent and subordinate member. 
Perhaps, however, there may be historical reasons 
for Arnold's view, not apparent from the mere struc- 
ture of this formulary. Let us hear : — 

" I do not conceive the clauses in question were retained 
deliberately by our Reformers after the propriety of retain- 
ing or expunging them had been distinctly submitted to their 
minds. They retained the Creed, I doubt not, deliberately ; 
to show that they wished to keep the faith of the general 
Church in matters relating to the Arian, Macedonian, Nes- 
torian, Eutychian, and Socinian controversies ; and, as they 
did not scruple to burn Arians, so neither would they be 
likely to be shocked by the damnatory clauses against them ; 
but I do not imagine that the Article about the Creed was 



76 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

intended in the least to refer to the clauses, as if they sup- 
posed that a man might embrace the rest of the Creed, and 
yet reject them. Nor do I think that the Reformers, or the 
best and wisest men of the Church since, would have ob- 
jected to any man's subscription, if they had conceived such 
a case ; but would have said, c What we mean you to em- 
brace is the belief of the general Church, as expressed in 
the three Creeds, with regard to the points, many of them 
having been disputed, on which those Creeds pronounce : 
the degree of blamableness in those who do not embrace 
this belief is another matter, on which we do not intend to 
speak, particularly in this Article.' I do not think that there 
is any thing evasive or unfair in this." — Vol. II. p. 121. 

A thoughtful man must assuredly be very hard- 
pressed, before he could produce so extraordinary an 
argument as this. In the times of the Reformers, it 
appears, there were two grades of certainty felt as 
to Christian doctrine. Some points had been dis- 
puted, and were known to be in peril from the varia- 
ble movements of opinion : others had never been 
called in question, and remained fixed in uncon- 
scious security as the faith of Christendom. The 
doctrine of the Trinity was among the former; the 
perdition of heretics and unbelievers among the 
latter. The Reformers were well acquainted with 
Arian and Socinian perverseness, — and had perhaps 
not been without difficulties on these matters them- 
selves : but that misbelievers must be damned, is a 
thing which they never supposed that any body could 
doubt. They burned Arians without scruple ; and 
made sure that God would burn them too. Upon 
both these elements of their belief, the questioned 



DR. ARNOLD. 77 

and the unquestioned, they have left us their mind ; 
what reception are we to give it, when we bind our- 
selves to their formularies ? Arnold's decision is, — 
" We must adopt their opinions ; but we may freely 
throw away their certainties : what they knew to be 
mutable, we must not presume to change ; what they 
supposed to be immutable, we may alter as we 
please." Is it conceivable that the founders of the 
Reformed Churches, while binding their followers on 
all debated matters, meant to leave them free on all 
the questions which no scepticism had yet dared to 
approach ? True, they did not contemplate the par- 
ticular case of half-belief which now arises, and 
made no special provision to meet it. But a man 
may abstain from taking security for either of two 
reasons, because he is willing to make us a present, 
or because he is assured we shall acknowledge the 
debt. Arnold admits the profoundness and uncon- 
sciousness of the Reformers' trust, and gives it as a 
reason for cheating them of their obedience, and 
pocketing a license which they never left. And he 
thinks there is " nothing evasive or unfair in this " ! 

In other passages he defends the acceptance of 
holy orders by men who " cannot yield an active be- 
lief to the words of every part of the Articles and 
Liturgy as true," on the ground that, without this 
latitude, " the Church could by necessity receive into 
the ministry only men of dull minds, or dull con- 
sciences : of dull, nay almost of dishonest minds, if 
they can persuade themselves that they actually 
agree in every minute particular with any great 
number of human propositions ; of dull consciences, 
7* 



78 MARTINEAll's MISCELLANIES. 

if, exercising their minds freely, and yet believing 
that the Church requires the total adhesion of the 
understanding, they still, for considerations of their 
own convenience, enter into the ministry in her des- 
pite." (Vol. II. p. 173.) 

The reasoning of this passage, if we understand 
it, proceeds thus : The Church must have men of 
active minds ; only men of dull minds can sign the 
Articles with full belief; therefore the Church must 
have men who sign the Articles without full belief. 
But these men must also have lively consciences : if 
they take signature to denote full belief, they must 
have dull consciences to sign without it ; therefore 
they should think that signature does not denote full 
belief. Unhappily, however, this a priori argument 
lands us in conclusions wholly at variance with fact. 
The Church has not left her intent as to the Arti- 
cles and Liturgy, and the degree of assent demanded 
to them, a matter of doubtful inference. The thirty- 
sixth Canon orders that " no person shall be received 
into the ministry," — " except he shall first subscribe 
to these three Articles following, in such manner and 
sort as we have here appointed." 

1. The declaration of supremacy, which it is need- 
less to cite. 

"2. That the Book of Common Prayer, and of 
ordering of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, containeth 
in it nothing contrary to the Word of God, &c. 

" 3. That he alloweth the Book of Articles of Re- 
ligion agreed upon by the Archbishops, &c. ; and 
that he acknowledged all and every the Articles 
therein contained, being in number nine-and-thirty, 



DR. ARNOLD. 79 

besides the Ratification, to be agreeable to the Word 
of God. 

" To these three Articles, whosoever will subscribe, 
he shall, for the avoiding of all ambiguities, subscribe 
in this order, and form of words, setting down both 
his Christian and surname, viz. : ' I, N. N., do will- 
ingly and ex animo subscribe to these three Arti- 
cles above mentioned, and to all things that are con- 
tained in them.' " 

All argument against the necessity of ex animo 
subscription being set aside by this Canon, Dr. Ar- 
nold has only put it in the power of opponents to 
retort upon the Church thus : — All clergymen must 
declare their full assent to the Articles and Liturgy : 
in doing this, they either honestly believe them 
throughout, or they do not : if they do, they are men 
of " dull minds " ; if they do not, they are men of 
" dull consciences " ; therefore " the Church can re- 
ceive into its ministry only men of dull minds or 
dull consciences." And is it not undeniable that, in 
fact, the entrance into her service, smooth and easy 
to thoughtless mediocrity and worldly ambition, is 
beset by scruples and difficulties, chiefly for men of 
intellectual genius and moral earnestness ? A Beres- 
ford and a Blomfield glide in with complacent smiles ; 
an Arnold passes with reluctant starts, and bitter 
conflicts, and many a pause of prayer and fear. They 
carry with them the undisturbed consistency so easy 
to minds without lofty aspiration, and are of no 
dimmer sight or less graceful movement than before : 
but he has withstood the repugnance of his noble 
nature, and a speck is thenceforth fixed on his intel- 



80 



MARTINEAITS MISCELLANIES. 



lectual clearness, which, at one part of his course of 
thought, compels him to feel his way along the con- 
ventional path, and restrains the free step with which 
elsewhere he pursues " in open vision " only what is 
great and true. 

For nine years after his ordination, Arnold was 
settled, as private tutor, at Laleham, near Staines : 
mingling, with the duties of his own house, no slight 
share of aid to the curate of the parish, in the 
church, the workhouse, and the cottage. The pe- 
riod was one of little incident, but of the deepest 
moment in his internal history. It was his initia- 
tion into the real business of life, and showed at 
once the masterly hand with which he was to rule 
its affairs and manage its responsibilities. It was 
the commencement of his most sacred domestic 
ties, and bears traces of the genial ripening of his 
character beneath the warmth of new affections. It 
witnessed the beginning of all his literary undertak- 
ings, and the completion of his articles on Roman 
History in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. It in- 
troduced him to the knowledge of Niebuhr, whose 
influence was thenceforth to constitute so large an 
element in his mental progress. But the great func- 
tion of this time was to establish the real seat of 
Arnold's strength ; it became evident at once that he 
was at home, not in the cloister, but in the city and 
the field : respectable in scholarship, insensible to 
art, undistinguished in philosophy, he was great in 
action. His sphere was not large : but the healthy 
vigor which he infused into the whole ; the moral 
earnestness which put pupils, household, almost the 



DR. ARNOLD. 81 

village, under his control; the quantity of work of 
all sorts which he got through himself, and inspired 
others to achieve, indicated the remarkable capacity 
for government, which dictated his early longing for 
a statesman's life. And, as is usual in such cases, 
the expansion of the leading faculty, instead of over- 
whelming, reawakened all the rest: the more he did, 
the more also he thought and felt; reflection and 
emotion deepening and widening through the mate- 
rials of an outward industry, which, he sometimes 
feared, would stifle them. Archbishop Whately 
had early pointed out the indications, in Arnold's 
fellowship examination, of a remarkable faculty of 
mental growth. We doubt whether the prediction, 
true as it was, would have been conspicuously ful- 
filled, if he had remained within the walls of a col- 
lege. In him, intellect and affection waited upon 
the conscience and the Will; and became great and 
rich and tender in the divine hardships of duty, and 
the strenuous service of God. During the years 
spent at Laleham, especially the earlier ones, there 
are many marks of crude, unmellowed feeling, of 
conventional sentiment, of prosaic and utilitarian 
estimates of human interests. The thoughts with 
which he anticipates his married lot (Vol. I. p. 60) 
are after the most ordinary fashion of moralizing. 
His views in the choice of a profession are according 
to the approved canons of spiritual prudence; and 
he takes to the Church, not so much inspired by the 
high aims of a holy calling, as from the wish for an 
asylum (Vol. I. p. 53) from moral danger, ^ ae/Sao-cas, 
dXk y do-KTjo-eus evcKa. Even his sermons contain more 



82 'MARTINEAu's MISCELLANIES. 

profit-and-loss religion than consists with the noble- 
ness of his later Christianity ; as in p. 243, where 
"the good which a man may get from acting" on 
holy principle is made to depend on its "lasting for 
ever," instead of " being over in less than a hundred 
years." And finally, his style — that unerring expres- 
sion of a man's whole spiritual nature — was at this 
time rude and shapeless, marked by a certain business- 
like simplicity and directness, but destitute of the 
force given by the under-play of a living enthusiasm 
beneath the dry matter of the composition. The 
fuel, however, of his central being was kindled ; life, 
like a glowing furnace, rose to a higher and higher 
intensity, and penetrated with a glorious heat even his 
originally colder and remoter faculties ; till his whole 
nature was fused into one living mass, radiating force 
and fire throughout the sphere of his activity. 

It was not till he assumed his office as head mas- 
ter of Rugby School, that all the energy and great- 
ness of his character were fully brought out. The 
fourteen years which he spent there, were in all re- 
spects the most memorable of his career ; showing 
how, amid many discouragements and frequent lone- 
liness in his favorite aims, he could prevail over the 
heaviest tasks submitted to his hands, and the most 
plausible sophistries competing for his mind. "We 
must dismiss with few words the whole subject of 
his School management. It is admitted on all 
hands, that he turned to the best account all the ele- 
ments of good in the English system of public 
schools, and struggled manfully and with unexam- 
pled success against its peculiar evils. His general 



DR. ARNOLD. 83 

theory of his office may be stated thus ; — the pe- 
culiar character of the English gentleman being as- 
sumed as an historical datum, the aim of education 
should be to penetrate and pervade this with a spirit 
of Christian self-regulation. He was aware how 
great was the revolution implied in the accomplish- 
ment of this end ; that moral heroism must take the 
place of feudal independence ; devout allegiance, of 
personal self-will ; respect for faithful work, of the 
ambition for careless idleness ; manly simplicity and 
earnestness, of gentlemanly poco-curanteism ; the 
true shame for evil, of the false shame for good ; that 
contempt of pleasure must be added to the contempt 
of danger and of pain ; and courage to defy corrupt 
fashion and opinion, to the hardihood which resists 
the aggressions of unjust authority. With numbers 
of his scholars he doubtless realized a near approxi- 
mation to his aim ; with none, perhaps, did he wholly 
fail ; for he strongly marked, and rendered unmis- 
takably felt, the evils with w T hich he was resolved 
to contend, and by which he would never be baffled. 
There was no hope that he would ever connive at 
any thing false or wrong; there was no fear that he 
would overlook or desert any faithful will, striving 
with limited powers w r ithin, or the jeers of low ridi- 
cule without. There was established an absolute 
confidence in his truth and justice : every culprit 
felt the shadow of his frown, every clear con- 
science the assurance of his protection. His atten- 
tion was not reserved for pupils of remarkable at- 
tainments and brilliant promise, who might reward 
his assiduity by conferring distinction on their in- 



84 



MARTINEAITS MISCELLANIES. 



structor. None were so loved and honored as those 
who persisted in laborious effort without the power 
or talent to win admiration and command success ; 
of such a one he said, " I could stand before that 
man, hat in hand." And if, amid the host of the 
foolish and corrupt, there appeared any 

" Abdiel, faithful found 
Among the faithless, faithful only he ; 
Among innumerable false, unmoved, 
Unshaken, unseduced, un terrified " ; 

he was secure of Arnold's exulting sympathy, and, 
as " he passed long way through hostile scorn," 
might hear in heart his voice of blessing, 

" Servant of God, well done ; well hast thou fought 
The better fight, who single hast maintained 
Against revolted multitudes the cause 
Of truth." 

The personal qualities of Arnold were eminently 
fitted to give success to these high aims and noble 
sympathies. Frank, brave, guileless, he mingled no 
moroseness with his moral severity, no weakness 
with his pity, no secrecy with his vigilance. His 
joyous and trustful nature had never divested itself 
of the best attributes of boyhood, but simply added 
to them the wisdom and the strength of manhood. 
His elastic spirits, his vivacity of expression, his love 
of the open air and all athletic sports, were no incon- 
siderable qualifications for obtaining the admiration 
of boys; and, above all, he wholly lost sight of him- 
self, and never gave occasion for even the perversest 
spirit to suspect that his battle with school evils was 
a contest for personal dignity or power ; in his dom- 



DR. ARNOLD. 85 

inance over wrong, he was himself but serving' the 
right. But the most vivid individual character could 
not directly reach the multitude collected in a public 
school. In the chapel, indeed, they were all sub- 
mitted immediately to his most powerful influence, 
and the constancy and fervor with which he availed 
himself of this means of discipline are known to 
all who are familiar with his Rugby Sermons. At 
this moment, no poem, no biography, actual or pos- 
sible, occurs to us, which we had rather read, than 
the secret spirit-history of that chapel. The many- 
colored thoughts, evanescent, it may be, but not 
traceless, of those young hearts ; the dark, obdurate 
will, struck by a sudden flash, then closing sullenly 
again ; the light, unstable mind, fluttered with mo- 
mentary shame; the first sense of lost innocence, 
awakening the sorrowful images of too happy sis- 
ters, and mother with no reproaches on her face ; the 
manly pity for a younger brother newly come, and 
high resolves, were it only for his sake; the eager 
outlook into life, deep in its early flush of glory ; the 
opening awe, the thrilling touch, of things invisible ; 
the dawning perception of the divineness of Christ, 
and nearness of the living God; the tumultuous 
grief roused by the funeral bell, or the solemn won- 
der, as if it swung in the air of eternity, and made 
the dead silence speak, — all these primal stirrings 
of expanding life contain the profoundest interest 
and beauty, both as prophetic of a most various hu- 
man growth, and as attesting the healthful power of 
the soul creating it. 

In connection with this part of Arnold's labors, 
8 



86 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

we have seen new reason to justify an old admira- 
tion for a religious rite prevailing in most of the 
Protestant churches, — the practice of Confirmation. 
We have no sympathy, indeed, with the form which 
it assumes in the English Church ; we acknowledge 
the admixture with it of false and pernicious moral 
ideas ; we object to its use, as an appendage to the 
ceremony of Baptism, and its connection with the 
superstitions represented by that word. Still, when 
stripped of ritual and traditional adhesions, it repre- 
sents a momentous fact in the religious life of indi- 
viduals, and helps to turn that fact to its proper 
account. There is a period, extending some years 
beyond mere infancy, of imperfect and inchoate re- 
sponsibility, during which the unreflecting play of 
instinctive feeling constitutes the moving force, and 
external restraint prescribed by others affords the 
regulative principle, of all our activity ; the child is 
delivered over for guidance to his parents and pro- 
tectors, with whom rests the largest share of ac- 
countability for what he is, for what he believes, for 
what he loves. This period passes away ; and an- 
other comes, in which the instinctive temptations 
become more dangerous, and less within reach of 
outward rule and authority ; but at the same time 
the faculties needed for self-guidance rapidly ap- 
proach their full dimensions : reflective self-conscious- 
ness deepens, manifesting itself under the form of 
mere shyness in ordinary natures, of boastful and 
irreverent license in bad ones, of moral thoughtful- 
ness in minds of higher tone : the knowledge of 
good and evil, and the force of the electing will, 



DR. ARNOLD. 87 

assume new precision and strength ; and the objects 
both of human admiration and of religious faith 
become the centres of more intent inspection and 
earnest wonder. The transition from one of these 
periods to the other is perhaps the greatest spiritual 
crisis of human life ; the turn of the tide, when we 
quit the haven and drift to the unstable sea, with or 
without the compass for dark nights, and the eye 
skilled to steer by the eternal stars. We would 
mark, with devout recognition, this era of experi- 
ence ; give voice, method, and direction to its tumul- 
tuous emotions; bring its burning aspirations to 
merge in the cool ascending breath of prayer ; dis- 
tinctly present the young disciple, fast becoming one 
of us, before the Master at whose feet he is to sit, 
and the God whose still, small voice he is to hear. 
True, the step into this full responsibility is not in- 
stantaneous, and can have no exact date assigned 
to it ; and no turn should be given to a confirma- 
tion service, implying that personal accountability is 
postponed till its arrival. But exaggerations of this 
kind are easily avoided, so as to render such a rite 
truly symbolical of the fact ; and, with such provis- 
ion, we would fain, by some Christian consecration, 
claim for good the young romance of life, and turn 
the seasonal bloom of nature into fruitful flowers of 
pure faith. 

"With all the aids of the chapel services, Arnold 
could not bring his personal influence to bear imme- 
diately upon many of the scholars. Without some 
interposed medium between himself and the multi- 
tude of boys, it was impossible to propagate the 



88 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

power of his ideas and principles throughout the 
school. For this end, he not only availed himself of 
the cooperation of the Assistant Masters, but, bring- 
ing the Sixth Form or Praepostors into close connec- 
tion with himself, invested them with larger powers 
and more direct responsibilities of control over the 
younger pupils than they had possessed before. This 
system offered, doubtless, the best chance of intro- 
ducing some approach to moral government into the 
wild elements of a public school; and infused a 
wholesome action of the a/no-roi into the combination 
usually presented in such an institution, of turbu- 
lent democracy, and absolute despotism. For the 
youths themselves, thus trusted by Arnold with a 
share of his authority, the benefit was great. The 
manliness, the earnestness, the religious convictions, 
which were remarked at Oxford and Cambridge as 
frequent characteristics of the Rugby scholars, were 
mainly acquired, it is probable, during the period of 
immediate contact with himself. The general im- 
pression, however, of the public school system, even 
as worked by Arnold, which we derive from these 
volumes, is very painful ; and strongly confirms the 
unfavorable recollections of our own experience. 
We have often thought that Hobbes's theory of 
society must have been suggested by his remem- 
brance of the grammar-school at Malmesbury. If 
there is any place in the world where every body 
is convinced that he has a right to every thing, and 
with unlimited voracity of claim absorbs whatever 
is within his reach, until he clashes against the appe- 
tences, no less universal and no less entitled, of his 



DR. ARNOLD. 89 

neighbors in the scramble ; where a state of war is 
the state of nature, ever and anon resumed to settle 
the exact sphere of every new-comer, and all deter- 
mination of rights has to be fought out; where order 
and law prevail in unstable equilibrium (like the 
right of search among our French allies) as disa- 
greeable conditions of a treaty of peace, and the 
only principle truly and heartily respected is, Do, if 
you dare, — certainly that place is an English public 
school. Speaking loosely, to live as they like and 
as they can is the primary rule of children ; to live 
as they ought, the primary rule for men. A crew of 
boys is an aggregate of self-wills, limiting one an- 
other by mutual interference and repulsion. A socie- 
ty of men is a community of consciences as well as 
interests, combining by mutual reverence, cooper- 
ation, and attraction. Hence public opinion, in 
adult society, is expressive of the minimum of moral 
principle that will be allowed; in schools, of the 
maximum of moral principle that will be endured : 
and the force which, in our maturest strength, comes 
in aid of conscience, in our early weakness presses, 
with frequent scoff and scorn, against it. This is an 
unequal match for wills imperfectly inured to hardi- 
hood. Hence Arnold's frequent laments as to the 
irresistible strength of a low and tyrannical school- 
opinion ; his vain attempts to encourage any large 
number to struggle against the stream ; his sorrow, 
ever renewed, at watching the declension from inno- 
cence to corruption ; and his pathetic forebodings 
on receiving, at the opening of each half-year, boys 
now in their home simplicity, but entering on a trial, 
8* 



90 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

always severe, and rarely triumphant. He admits 
that, while minds of peculiar strength are elevated 
by the ordeal, the ordinary class of amiable, well- 
disposed, neutral characters are usually carried away 
by the evil influence of the place, and gradually sink 
from promise into corruption. Can there be a plain- 
er confession of the unfitness of these schools for the 
vast majority of boys? Startled by the detection of 
something wrong, he exclaimed on one occasion : — 

" If this goes on, it will end either my life at Rugby, or 
my life all together. How can I go on with my Roman 
History ? There all is noble and high-minded, and here I 
find nothing but the reverse." 

And in a letter to Sir T. Pasley he says : — 
" Since I began this letter, I have had some of the trou- 
bles of school-keeping ; and one of those specimens of the 
evil of boy-nature, which makes me always unwilling to un- 
dergo the responsibility of advising any man to send his 
son to a public school. There has been a system of perse- 
cution carried on by the bad against the good ; and then, 
when complaint was made to me, there came fresh perse- 
cution on that very account ; and divers instances of boys 
joining in it out of pure cowardice, both physical and 
moral, when, if left to themselves, they would have rather 
shunned it. And the exceedingly small number of boys 
who can be relied upon for active and steady good on these 
occasions, and the way in which the decent and respectable 
of ordinary life (Carlyle's ' Shams ') are sure on these oc- 
casions to swim with the stream, and take part with the evil, 
makes me strongly feel exemplified what the Scripture 
says about the strait gate and the wide one, — a view of 
human nature, which, when looking on human life in its 
full dress of decencies and civilizations, we are apt, I im- 



DR. ARNOLD. 91 

agine, to find it hard to realize. But here, in the naked- 
ness of boy-nature, one is quite able to understand how- 
there could not be found so many as even ten righteous in 
a whole city. And how to meet this evil I really do not 
know ; but to find it thus rife after I have been [so many] 
years fighting against it, is so sickening, that it is very hard 
not to throw up the cards in despair, and upset the table. 
But then the stars of nobleness, which I see amidst the 
darkness, in the case of the few good, are so cheering, that 
one is inclined to stick to the ship again, and have another 
good try at getting her about." — Vol. I. p. 161. 

That he was not, however, without the refresh- 
ments due to so faithful a heart, is evident from the 
conclusion of the following passage, of most charac- 
teristic beauty : — 

" A great school is very trying. It never can present 
images of rest and peace ; and when the spring and activi- 
ty of youth is altogether unsanctified by any thing pure and 
elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is as diz- 
zying, and almost more morally distressing, than the shouts 
and gambols of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see 
so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow. In a 
parish, amongst the poor, whatever of sin exists, there is 
sure also to be enough of suffering ; poverty, sickness, and 
old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But, with boys 
of the richer classes, one sees nothing but plenty, health, 
and youth ; and these are really awful to behold, when one 
must feel that they are unblessed. On the other hand, few 
things are more beautiful than when one does see all holy 
thoughts and principles, not the forced growth of pain, 
or infirmity, or privation ; but springing up, as by God's im- 
mediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh 
and beautiful ; full of so much hope for this world as well 
as for heaven." — Vol. II. p. 137. 



92 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

Though Arnold's great work lay at Rugby, and he 
achieved it in a way which was soon felt in every 
public school in England, his sympathies were not 
collected there; they were interwoven with society 
at every fibre, and bled with the wounds of humani- 
ty everywhere. No danger could befall the state, 
but he was startled by it, and stood up to give the 
warning or inspire the defence. No idolatries could 
be set up within the Church, but he exposed and 
confronted them with resolute Iconoclasm. And as 
evils of both kinds seemed to him to arise from 3, 
false theory of Christianity on the one hand, and a 
false conception of the re\os of civilized communities 
on the other, the great purpose of his life was to 
write a work on Christian politics, organizing into a 
system, and presenting in their unity, the opinions 
now scattered over his occasional writing and cor- 
respondence on Theology, Social Philosophy, Eccle- 
siastical Polity, Education, and Government. For 
want of an adequate exposition of his staminal 
ideas on this subject, it is difficult even now, and 
was much more so at the time of their expression, 
to criticize w T ith advantage his sentiments on the 
party topics of the day; and they often appeared 
like narrow prejudices, when in fact they were deduc- 
tions from a wide and generous philosophy. As we 
may have occasion in a future Number to notice his 
" Fragment on the Church," just published at the 
particular desire, it is understood, of Mr. Bunsen, we 
shall reserve this whole matter, with his connected 
opinions as to the terms of citizenship and the meth- 
ods of public education, for consideration hereafter. 



DR. ARNOLD. 93 

Even his Roman History was subsidiary in his mind 
to the development of his conception as to a Chris- 
tian TroXtreia. To his practical understanding no the- 
ory of the Church could be constructed without its 
history ; no history of it could be written without en- 
tering deeply into the spirit of its early struggle with 
Paganism, and observing the inevitable action and 
reaction of the two religions ; nor could any appre- 
hension of that spirit be reached, without a sympa- 
thy with the recollections and traditional glories 
which gave the Western Polytheism its strength, and 
a consequent familiarity with the palmy days and 
legendary lore of Roman faith and Roman virtue. 
Over this border-land, covered with the cities of the 
old civilization, and the forest-growth of the new, 
Gibbon is at present our only guide. His sympa- 
thies were wholly given, not only to the ancient 
world, but to its period of material grandeur and 
corruption, when the severity of its manners and the 
earnestness of its life had passed away. His whole 
spirit was unsocial and irreverent; his affections 
never deep in the sorrows, his moral sense not re- 
volted by the sins, of the beings he presents on his 
magnificent stage ; his imagination resting on the 
pageantry, the scenery, the mechanism, the dress, the 
evolutions of national existence, but not penetrating 
to its real life ; and his Epicurean cast of character 
wholly disqualifying him for any appreciation of the 
genius and agency of Christianity. Arnold's en- 
thusiasm fell pretty nearly on the same objects as 
Gibbon's contempt; travelling through the heathen 
world as a disciple of the porch rather than the gar- 



94 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

den, he pitched his admiration on Republican, not 
on Imperial Rome; and passing through Christen- 
dom, not as an alien, but as a sworn brother, he 
would have taught men the meaning of a " martyr" 
and made them feel that it was not ridiculous to lay 
down the life for simplicity and truth. 

There are, we think, in Arnold's scheme of opin- 
ion, many deviations from logical consistency. But 
there never was a man whose system of thought 
was pervaded by a more evident moral consistency. 
His character — a living whole — cannot be ana- 
lyzed without being lost from view. Its beauty is 
not of form, like a statue; or of color, like a pic- 
ture; but of movement, like — what he simply was 
— a man : and the moment you arrest it to seek its 
essence, it is gone. Still we may say, without much 
error, that at the very fountain-head of his nature, 
far up as among the old granitic rocks of a hardier 
world, there sprang up a clear, fresh, exhaustless love 
of goodness ; that sometimes rushed down in a tor- 
rent, like passion, only that, with all its vehemence, 
it was never turbid ; that mingled a purity with all 
the courses of his thought, and fertilized the retreats 
of his affections, and wholly surrounded and bap- 
tized the temple of his worship. The moral ele- 
ment — and that too, originally, in its bare and rug- 
ged form of the sense of justice and hatred of 
wrong — was transcendent over all else in him. It 
was not, as in most men, passive and negative, con- 
tent with preserving its possessor from evil, and ex- 
ercising only a protectorate ; but a right royal pow- 
er, with divine title to the world ; aggressive, indom- 



DR. ARNOLD. 95 

itable, magnanimous. Christianity had something 
to do, to make him rest and sit as a disciple at the 
feet; to raise him to the spiritual heights of its 
heaven, and subdue him to the sweet charities of 
earth. But it did both. He was an evangelized 
Stoic. From walking in the Porch, he came to 
kneel before the Cross. No wonder that he burst 
into tears, when — once in conversation — St. Paul 
was set in some one's estimate above St. John: for 
he himself passed from the likeness of one towards 
that of the other, and so had sympathies with both ; 
and the fire of the man of Tarsus subdued itself in 
him, as life advanced, more and more into the Ephe- 
sian apostle's altar-light of saintly love. 

The leading principle of his character may be 
traced through his sentiments on subjects wildly re- 
mote from each other. It was his Moral Faculty, 
his sense of Obligation, that awakened his intense 
antipathy to both Benthamism and Newmanism, — 
the two grand counterfeits forged at the opposite ex- 
tremes of error, of true moral responsibility and per- 
sonal duty ; the one merging the conscience in self- 
interest, the other in priestcraft ; the one identifying 
moral and sentient good, the other separating moral 
and spiritual; both extinguishing the proper person- 
ality and individual sacredness of man ; the one 
treating him as a thing to be mechanically shaped, 
the other as a thing to be mysteriously conjured 
with ; with infallible nostrums, labelled " motives " 
in the one case, " sacraments " in the other, promis- 
ing to cure the sick world, but alas ! only decoying it 
from the natural sources of health, and spoiling its 



96 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

relish for the free breath of heaven. In opposition 
to both these systems, which sought for human con- 
duct some external guide, one in social utility, the 
other in church authority, Arnold held fast to the 
internal guidance, which he maintained God had 
given to all, and through which his Will was practi- 
cable, and Himself accessible to all. That this was 
the precise position which he conceived himself to 
occupy, is evident from the following exposition of 
his moral faith : — 

" To supply the place of Conscience with the apxai of 
Fanaticism on one hand, and of Utilitarianism on the oth- 
er, — on one side is the mere sign from Heaven, craved by 
those who heeded not Heaven's first sign written within 
them ; — on the other, it is the idea, which, hardly hover- 
ing on the remotest outskirts of Christianity, readily flies 
off to the camp of Materialism and Atheism ; the mere 
pared and plucked notion of ' good ' exhibited by the word 
4 useful ' ; which seems to me the idea of ' good ' robbed 
of its nobleness, — the sediment from which the filtered 
water has been assiduously separated. It were a strange 
world, if there were indeed no one apxireKTovucov eldos but 
that of the £vp,<p€pov ; if koKov were only koAoz/, 6tl gvfxfapov. 
But this is one of the peculiarities of the English mind ; 
the Puritan and the Benthamite has an inmense part of this 
in common ; and thus the Christianity of the Puritan is 
coarse and fanatical ; — he cannot relish what there is in 
it of beautiful, or delicate, or ideal. Men get embarrassed 
by the common cases of a misguided conscience ; but a com- 
pass may be out of order as well as a conscience, and the 
needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet 
in that direction. Still, the compass, generally speaking, is a 
true and sure guide, and so is the conscience ; and you can 



DR. ARNOLD. 97 

trace the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as 
on the former. Again, there is confusion in some men's 
minds, who say that, if we so exalt conscience, we make 
ourselves the paramount judges of all things, and so do not 
live by faith and obedience. But he who believes his con- 
science to be God's law, by obeying it obeys God. It is as 
much obedience, as it is obedience to follow the dictates of 
God's Spirit ; and in every case of obedience to any law or 
guide whatsoever, there must always be one independent 
act of the mind pronouncing one determining proposition, 
c I ought to obey ' ; so that in obedience, as in every moral 
act, we are and must be the paramount judges, because we 
must ourselves decide on that very principle, 'that we ought 
to obey.' 

" And as for Faith, there is again a confusion in the use 
of the term. It is not Scriptural, but fanatical, to oppose 
faith to reason. Faith is properly opposed to sense, and is 
the listening to the dictates of the higher part of our mind, 
to which alone God speaks, rather than to the lower part of 
us, to which the world speaks." 

The peculiarities of his theological opinion are 
referable, no less distinctly than his philosophy, to 
the depth and clearness of his moral sentiments. It 
was a necessary consequence of this, that the dif- 
ference between right and wrong should present 
itself to him as an infinite quantity ; that separating 
the two, there should seem " a great gulf fixed " ; 
that man should appear to range, from his lowest to 
his highest desires, over an immense interval, and in 
his extremes of temptation and aspiration to lie 
apart from himself, far as demon from angel. He 
felt, with a profound consciousness, the severe and 
internecine struggle between these two, inevitable to 
9 



98 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

the faithful mind, and understood the whole history 
of that inner strife, the shame of defeat, the thankful- 
ness of victory. Hence his conceptions both of the Di- 
vine Government (including the Christian economy) 
and of the allotted work of life amount almost to a 
scheme of Dualism. He looks up, and sees God, in 
himself, in his Christ, in his Spirit, in all that is 
holy enough to represent him below, engaged in 
" putting down moral evil." He looks within, and 
sees his own soul enlisted, by an articulate and bind- 
ing call, in the same great warfare. He looks around, 
and in the constitution and arrangements of the 
world he sees the well-ordered battle-field, and in the 
evolutions of history, the marchings and counter- 
marchings of hosts, prepared for the great campaign. 
One to whom the whole scene of things resolved 
itself into this aspect could not but enter, with pas- 
sionate fellow-feeling, into the character of St. Paul ; 
seize, with instinctive apprehension, the great scheme 
of the Apostle's spiritual Christianity; thrust away, 
with indignant reason, every priest, every rite, every 
idol of the fancy, that interposed between him and 
the Christ in heaven, whose immediate disciple — 
" by faith, not by sight " — he was, no less than the 
convert of Damascus, and to whom alone his alle- 
giance was due. In the same spirit he objects to 
the mere historical Christ of the Unitarians : instead 
of a being nearly two thousand years off, he needs 
to feel himself the disciple of one who is living now, 
and to whose heavenly spirit his own may draw nigh 
in trustful devotion. In his view of Christ, there is 
nothing to which, with very slight modification of 



DR. ARNOLD. 99 

language, we should not heartily assent. He is re- 
garded, in Arnold's theology, less as the achiever of 
Redemption, than as himself a Revelation of the 
Divine nature ; it was not as the author of binding 
precepts, or the teacher of new truths, or the exem- 
plar of a good life, but as the symbol of God's moral 
perfections, that he was most dear and holy to this 
noble heart. Arnold's practical, and little specula- 
tive or ideal mind, rendered this view particularly 
needful for him : God, in himself, — the Absolutely 
Infinite, — being to his thought inconceivable and 
unapproachable, a Beos appr)To s , awfully beyond human 
affections, unless contemplated in some concrete ex- 
pression of his nature. The cast of Arnold's mind 
gave him a deep sympathy with the human element 
in the Scriptures; the answer of his quick nature 
told him, in many a prophet's strain, and many an 
historic touch, that a man's hand had been there ; 
and his habit of critical examination of the records 
of antiquity made it impossible for him to overlook 
the symptoms of origin not infallible in some of the 
books. Hence he wholly repudiates the doctrine of 
plenary inspiration, and even speaks of Coleridge's 
" Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," bold as it is, as 
only the " beginning of the end " on this great sub- 
ject. He says to Mr. Justice Coleridge: — 

" Have you seen your uncle's c Letters on Inspiration,' 
which I believe are to be published ? They are well fitted 
to break ground in the approaches to that momentous ques- 
tion which involves in it so great a shock to existing notions ; 
the greatest, probably, that has ever been given since the dis- 
covery of the falsehood of the doctrine of the Pope's infalli- 



100 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

bility. Yet it must come, and will end, in spite of the 
fears and clamors of the weak and bigoted, in the higher 
exalting, and more sure establishing, of Christian truth." — 
Vol. I. p. 358. 

Nor did he, in relinquishing the literary inspira- 
tion, cling fast, as some ineffectually pretend to do, 
to the personal infallibility of the Apostles, even on 
matters nearly affecting their own mission and the 
faith of the early Church : but found it not incon- 
sistent with his unconditional reverence for St. Paul, 
to acknowledge that he entertained the fallacious 
expectation of an approaching end of the world. 

Condemning the spurious heavenly-mindedness 
affected by certain religious professors, he says : — 

" There are some, Englishmen unhappily, but most un- 
worthy to be so, who affect to talk of freedom and a citi- 
zen's rights and duties as things about which a Christian 
should not care. Like all their other doctrines, this comes 
out of the shallowness of their little minds, ; understanding 
neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.'' True it is 
that St. Paul, expecting that the world was shortly to end, 
tells a man not to care even if he were in a state of per- 
sonal slavery. That is an endurable evil which will shortly 
cease, not in itself only, but in its consequences. But even 
for the few years during which he supposed the world would 
exist, he says, ' if thou mayest be free, use it rather.' " — 
Vol. II. p. 413. 

We can imagine, indeed, the consternation with 
which dogmatical Christians, who must have a be- 
lief imposed upon their nature, rather than educed 
from it, would regard Arnold's free dealings with 
the authority of Scripture in matters not spiritual. 



DR. ARNOLD. 101 

He could not shut his eyes to the manifest traces in 
the book of Daniel of an origin full as late as the 
reign of Antiochus Epiphanes ; and in proof of the 
mere historical character of its " pretended prophe- 
cies," he adduces, with apparent unconsciousness, the 
very same arguments which in*1724-1727 brought 
upon Collins the prolixity of frightened Churchmen 
and the imputation of secret unbelief. (Vol. II. p. 
188.) Perhaps his early study of Geology, under 
the guidance of Buckland, may have combined with 
historical criticisms to loosen the hold of the book 
of Genesis on his mind : we find him, at least, treat- 
ing the problem as to the origin of mankind from a 
common stock as an open question, remaining to be 
decided by physiological and ethnological research ; 
and he is even ready with a theory to meet the case 
of a plurality of races, and exhibit its harmony with 
the general analogy of Providence in the education 
of the world. (Vol. I. p. 371.) 

Well may orthodox rigor stand aghast, and think, 
What then becomes of our Adamic inheritance of 
corruption, "naturally engendered" in "every man"? 
of the fatal effects of the fall of our first parents ? 
of the whole scheme for redeeming our last race 
from its despair ? Either Christianity must forego 
its universal character, and be restrained to the tribe 
of whose progenitors the Mosaic narrative speaks ; 
or its whole economy must be addressed to the act- 
ual moral constitution of men, irrespective of their 
original parentage. It is not for us to satisfy such 
objections. We have little doubt that Arnold's doc- 
trine of human depravity was, like Coleridge's, a 
9* 



102 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

mere expression of the insatiable thirst of his intense 
moral nature: conscious of a love and desire of 
goodness far beyond the measure of his best attain- 
ment, feeling the interval between the obligations he 
reverently owned and the life he actually lived, he 
described this fact, which is human, not personal, by 
saying that the Will of man is stricken with disease 
and infirmity, and, without the helping spirit of God, 
is ill-matched with its acknowledged duties. The 
entire trust which he reposed on the oracles of Con- 
science and Reason is further evident from his adop- 
tion of Locke's opinion, — which it is the fashion to 
treat as virtual Anti-supernaturalism, — that " the 
doctrine must prove the miracle, not miracle the doc- 
trine." On this point he says :— • 

" You complain of those persons who judge of a Reve- 
lation, not by its evidence, but by its substance. It has 
always seemed to me that its substance is a most essential 
part of its evidence ; and that miracles wrought in favor of 
what was foolish or wicked, would only prove Manicheism. 
We are so perfectly ignorant of the unseen world, that the 
character of any supernatural power can only be judged of 
by the moral character of the statements which it sanctions ; 
thus only can we tell whether it be a revelation from God, 
or from the Devil. If his father tells a child something 
which seems to him monstrous, faith requires him to submit 
his own judgment, because he knows his father's person, 
and is sure, therefore, that his father tells it him. But we 
cannot thus know God, and can only recognize his voice by 
the words spoken being in agreement with our idea of his 
moral nature." — Vol. II. p. 221. 

All these free and natural movements of his mind 



DR. ARNOLD. 103 

on questions the most momentous, are concurrent 
with a manifest increase in the depth and loftiness 
of his religious character ; a coincidence perfectly- 
intelligible to those who appreciate, as he did, — 

" . . . . the great philosophical and Christian truth, which 
seems to me the very truth of truths, that Christian unity, 
and the perfection of Christ's Church, are independent of 
theological articles of opinion ; consisting in a certain moral 
state, and moral and religious affections, which have existed 
in good Christians of all ages and all communions, along 
with an infinitely varying proportion of truth and error." — 
Vol. I. p. 359. 

The supremacy of the moral nature in Arnold 
was so absolute, as to determine all his tastes exclu- 
sively towards objects of real and of human interest. 
He could never construct a world for himself, of 
ideas, of images, of things ; he must live among per- 
sons. Metaphysics, Art, Science, had no attractions 
for him. If he praises Plato, it is the Phcedo that 
extorts his admiration, and that chiefly for the lan- 
guage. (I. 391.) He does not care for Florence, 
(I. 304,) and throughout his Continental journeys 
never mentions even a picture or a statue. He could 
teach the first six books of Euclid! (II. 206,) and 
rather than have physical science the principal thing 
in his son's mind, he " would gladly have him think 
that the sun went round the earth, and that the 
stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue 
firmament." (II. 37.) And where human knowl- 
edge occupies the transition territory from things to 
persons, viz. in Natural History, or the study of liv- 
ing things, he was deterred from entering by the up- 



104 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

rising of imperfect moral sympathies, which could 
neither be laid asleep nor satisfied : "the whole sub- 
ject," he said, "of the brute creation is to me one 
of such painful mystery that I dare not approach 
it" (II. 348.) 

"We must tear ourselves away from this delightful 
companionship with one whose image will hence- 
forth stand in one of the most sacred niches of our 
memory. His political opinions, amply discussed 
in Reviews of a different character, we cannot notice. 
They were in the spirit with all the expressions of 
his mind : the joint results of a clear-sighted and 
unconquerable sense of justice and a profound his- 
torical wisdom, that, with that moral eye fully open, 
had read the lives of nations, and connected their 
punishments with their sins. His occasional faults, 
his vehement expression of opinion, his severe con- 
demnation of individuals not fairly obnoxious to per- 
sonal reproach, we feel no desire to draw forth for 
censure. These things may well pass, without a 
word, in such a man. It is hard enough to speak 
with just and wise appreciation of what is noble and 
great in one to whom we look up through so im- 
measurable a distance ; and one ought in truth to 
be like him, to show him as he is. Statuere qui sit 
sapiens vel maxime videtur esse sapientis. 



/Qf 



CHURCH AND STATE* 

[From the Prospective Review for May, 1845.] 

The questions which engage the attention of 
speculative men often appear to have little connec- 
tion with the actual affairs of their time : and are re- 
garded, both by those who discuss them and by 
those who despise them, as mere ideal things, touch- 
ing at no point the realities amid which they appear. 
Yet this estimate, invariably made by contempora- 
ries, is as invariably reversed by posterity. In the 
historical retrospect of any period, the relation be- 
tween its Thought and Action becomes clear : and 
its philosophy appears, no less than its poetry, its art, 
or even its polity, distinctly expressive of its real in- 

* The Ideal of a Christian Church considered in Comparison with 
existing Practice. By Rev. W. G. Ward, M. A., Fellow of Baliol 
College, Oxford. Second Edition. 1844. 

The Kingdom of Christ delineated ; in Two Essays, on our Lord's 
own Account of his Person and of the Nature of his Kingdom, and on 
the Constitution, Powers, and Ministry of a Christian Church, as ap- 
pointed by Himself. By Richard Whately, D. D., Archbishop of 
Dublin. 1841. 

On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea 
of each. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1839. 

Fragment on the Church. By Thomas Arnold, D. D., late Head 
Master of Rugby School. 1844. 



106 MARTINEAlj's MISCELLANIES. 

ternal life. Nay, the very literature which most af- 
fects universality is often most deeply stamped with 
the characteristics of age and race. The genius of 
a peculiar civilization, slowly and obscurely rising, 
appears to reach its culminating intensity in its 
philosophy. Standing at that point of its culture, 
we occupy the precise meridian from which it looked 
forth on the universe. What it missed and what it 
saw, what it loved and what it hated, all its concep- 
tions of truth and all its aspirations after good, are 
collected there, and so constructed into a systematic 
whole, as to be apprehensible at a single view. 
There is nothing more absolutely Hellenic than the 
Dialogues of Plato, or more distinctively mediaeval 
than the writings of Thomas Aquinas : the England 
of the Reformation perfected itself in Locke, and the 
France of the Revolution is reflected in Diderot. He 
who would thoroughly appreciate the actuating spir- 
it of any period must study, not only the debates of 
its Senates, but the discussions of its Schools. 

In the theories of Society produced by the great 
masters of thought in ancient and in modern times, 
we find this remarkable difference : that with the for- 
mer the grand problem is, to adjust the relations 
of the State to the Individual ; with the latter, of 
the State to the Church. Yet the change, when 
rightly interpreted, will appear a change rather of 
names than of things, and presents us only with two 
cases of a problem essentially one and the same. 
No one can suppose that the agency of the Individu- 
al, so much guarded against in the ideal communi- 
ties of the Greek philosophers, has vanished from 



CHURCH AND STATE. 107 

modern society, and carried off the difficulties which 
its presence was once felt to introduce. Nor is it 
correct to imagine that the influences which we de- 
note by the word Church constitute a new element 
special to Christian nations, and had not to be taken 
into account in schemes of ancient polity. They 
were in truth comprised in the Hellenic idea of the 
Slate ; which was not equivalent, as with us, to the 
mere aggregate of individual interests in respect to 
physical good, but represented all those moral ends 
which transcend personal happiness, and constitute 
the TeXeioTaTov ri\os of human life. An institution for 
the protection of "body and goods" would have 
been considered by Plato as a club of private per- 
sons requiring to be strictly watched ; or at most as 
a police organization subsidiary only to the true aims 
of government : while, on the other hand, the direct 
training of individual character, the influence over 
prevailing habits, the maintenance of the highest 
sentiments, which we consider the proper business of 
the Church, he claimed as characteristic functions of 
the public polity. So that, when we look to the 
principles of human nature operative in each, we 
find in the modern State only the corporate existence 
of the ancient Idi&Trjs; and in the ancient noXis the 
territorial sovereignty of the modern eKKk^o-la. The 
real subject of controversy is at bottom still the 
same ; as to the proper sphere and limits, in the af- 
fairs of men, of Self-will on the one hand and Rev- 
erence on the other. That the mere form of the 
question has undergone a change, is a natural conse- 
quence of the new cast which has been given to the 



108 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

elementary forces of social life. The Greek mythol- 
ogy and worship were, for the most part, unmoral, 
and had little tendency to control the individual will 
by a sentiment of duty ; and to inspire and maintain 
in a people the sense of a law higher than them- 
selves, philosophers, left at fault by the Temple, 
looked to the Senate-house. The Christian faith, on 
the other hand, is in its very essence moral, and 
wherever taken to heart, has established over private 
life the august rule of conscience. Religion, in its 
proper sense, having thus gone over from the State 
to the Individual, has left the functions of the sov- 
ereign power in a reduced condition, and made them 
rather protective of the personal desires, than an en- 
croachment upon them : and hence the modern no- 
tion of the purely negative office of government, 
and the limitation of its action to what are called 
secular affairs. 

It is easy to understand, when these changes are 
taken into account, why men whose minds were 
purely antique — as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle — 
regarded the State as wholly including all the influ- 
ences now contained under our word " Church," 
while men in sympathy with modern ideas — as 
Warburton and Locke — regard it as wholly exclud- 
ing them ; why writers imbued with the wisdom of 
both periods — as Hooker and Arnold — refuse to 
admit either agency as prohibitive of the other, and 
therefore pronounce the two spheres of operation ab- 
solutely coincident; and why those who engage 
themselves chiefly wih the transition from the Hea- 
then to the Christian civilization should admire, with 



CHURCH AND STATE. 109 

Mr. "Ward, the sacerdotal system of the Middle Ages, 
which practically leavened the mass of European 
population with Christian ideas, and should desire 
to subordinate the human sovereignty of govern- 
ment to the divine supremacy of the Church. 

At the present moment we can turn our eyes to 
no considerable province of Christendom, which is 
not agitated by the contest, between the State and 
the Church, for the private life of individuals. There 
seems to be a general conviction, that the Reforma- 
tion has developed itself into an excessive self-will ; 
that its maxims have weakened religious unity, and 
relaxed temporal authority ; that the great multitude 
of men require more systematic guidance, more pro- 
tection from temptation, more steady help towards a 
Christian life, than are secured by its methods, ever 
alternating between the repose of latitudinarian ease, 
and paroxysms of importunate zeal. That the let- 
alone system is incompetent to the moral manage- 
ment of the new economical conditions under which 
society exists, is the inference generally drawn from 
the frightful mass of practical Heathenism existing 
in the heart of Christian countries. But whether the 
new and needed power shall be assumed by the 
sceptre or the cross ; whether either can make good 
its exclusive prerogative, from natural reason, from 
human prescription, from divine ordination ; whether 
both must concur, and lay aside all mutual jealousy 
in a work demanding alike the strength of the one 
and the persuasion of the other, — are questions by 
which the whole mind of Europe is vehemently 
moved. Scotland, impatient of the restraints im- 
10 



110 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

posed by the law on its ecclesiastical activity, sets 
up its Free Church. Ireland, ruled by priests, is 
tempting the State — too long hated and defied — 
to seek alliance with the only power through which 
the functions of government can be recovered. Eng- 
land, ashamed of its neglected population, is agitat- 
ed by the rival efforts of a repentant legislature and 
a repentant clergy, aiming to regulate the labor, to 
abate the ignorance, to elevate the desires of the 
people, the one by legalized discipline, the other by 
a sacerdotal police. France, with a Catholic king, 
whose policy has been indulgent to a clergy long de- 
spised, sees its Church unsatisfied, and resolved to 
dispute with the University the right of control over 
public instruction. Switzerland becomes the centre 
of anxious attention to all Europe, while deciding 
the fate of the Jesuits, to whom Lucerne had intrust- 
ed the education of her citizens. And if at Treves 
another Luther has arisen in the person of Ronge, it 
is from too bold an attempt to reassert the power 
of Ultramontane superstition over the Catholics of 
modern Germany. Everywhere an aggressive ac- 
tion has commenced upon the private elements of 
society : and usually the civil and ecclesiastical pow- 
ers appear as competitors for the new influence 
which is confessedly required. Hence the revived 
interest in those discussions of polity, which have 
at all times so much attraction for thoughtful men, 
and have given occasion to the works of our greatest 
moralists. 

Of the treatises mentioned at the head of this 
article, only those of Coleridge and Arnold attempt 



CHURCH AND STATE. Ill 

directly to define the relation between the Church 
and State. The other two are wholly occupied with 
the internal constitution and proper office of the 
Christian Church considered by itself. Incidentally, 
however, a State theory is involved in this narrower 
discussion : for in proportion as the range of eccle- 
siastical functions is made to take in more or less of 
the moral work of society, will less or more remain 
for the civil power to undertake. Accordingly, there 
is no difficulty in perceiving that Mr. Ward and 
Archbishop Whately occupy the opposite extremities 
of political philosophy as well as of theological sys- 
tem. Their whole conception of human life is so 
different, that, in dealing with it, temporally or spir- 
itually, each would precisely invert the rules of the 
other. Whatever the one delights to disparage pre- 
sents the favorite views of the other ; the ideas which 
the one has lived to expel, it is the highest ambition 
of the other to restore ; and the lessons from Scrip- 
ture, from history, from science, from reflection, which 
constitute the characteristic wisdom of the one, are 
present to the other as a never-failing stock-on-hand 
of fallacies and follies. 

Mr. Ward maintains the world to have been pre- 
pared for a divine revelation by the inextinguishable 
activity of conscience; which has power, even where 
connected with a feeble will, to maintain a secret 
sense of danger, or, possibly, an ineffectual sadness 
of aspiration. He lays the greatest stress on the 
truths of Natural Religion and the obligations of 
Natural Law : and regards Christianity as through- 
out assuming these, and furnishing their supernatu- 



112 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

ral complement. The Church is an institution set 
up for the divine guidance of men ; to alarm, to 
counsel, to encourage them, to a moral obedience, of 
which, without such heavenly aid, they will only 
have a distant and passing dream. Her title to 
afford this guidance must be sought, not in any mere 
external credentials, but in her self-evidencing power 
to the conscience. Hence her discipline must begin 
with simply taking up the disciple's existing concep- 
tion of duty, and effecting its realization in his life ; 
and for the acknowledgment of her higher laws, the 
admission of her doctrines, and the adoption of her 
characteristic methods of worship, she must rely on 
the enlargement of moral perception and enrichment 
of spiritual knowledge which the habits of a holy 
life invariably bring. "What, now, is the nature of 
the institution to which so great a work is as- 
signed ? It consists of a sacerdotal order, holding 
a mediatorial position between a Holy God and a 
sinful world ; intrusted with certain mystic media, 
through which alone a reconciling grace can pass ; 
and dispensing the heavenly guidance to those ex- 
clusively who will accept the sacramental rites. 
Thus there is no communion possible between the 
human conscience and Divine Spirit except through 
the appointed priesthood ; the whole work and strife 
of penitence, of aspiration, of duty, throughout the 
earth, is without a benediction unless offered through 
them. Their office is not simply spiritual, — i. e. to 
deal, by the methods of earnest wisdom, with the 
spirit or moral reason of man ; but superhuman and 
WM-spiritual, — to hold and to distribute certain physi- 



CHURCH AND STATE. 113 

cal conditions of sanctity, of which they are deposi- 
taries, not from the purity of their affections, the 
clearness of their discernment, and the faithfulness 
of their wills, but from their standing in an un- 
broken line of ordination, reaching through the bodies 
of bishops to the Apostolic age. In addition, how- 
ever, to their supernatural function of dispensing or 
withholding the divine grace and forgiveness, they 
have natural duties of counsel, warning, and com- 
passion to perform. Members of a corporate com- 
munity, which has gathered to it for eighteen centu- 
ries the moral experience of saintly men, and whose 
archives contain a record of every temptation and 
sorrow that can befall, and every conquest that can 
ennoble, the human heart, they have access to the 
wisdom of ages, and are trained in such familiarity 
with its stores as to derive from it the discipline and 
rules suited to every new emergency. In the private 
confessional they must watch and guide the indi- 
vidual conscience : in public convocation, estimate 
the duty of classes, regulate the usages of profes- 
sions, and pronounce on the moralities of empire. 
Their duties have an immense range over the morals, 
the discipline, the thought, the government of so- 
ciety. In morals they have a negative office, as the 
stern representatives of the divine abhorrence of 
evil: and must proclaim the hatefulness of sin by 
denying the communion, not only to open transgres- 
sors, but to the idolaters of wealth and the uncon- 
scious slaves of low and unspiritual desires; by 
excluding from the education of the young every 
thing at variance with the tastes of a holy mind ; by 
10* 



114 MARTINEAtl's MISCELLANIES. 

falling on the neck of each softened transgressor, 
and committing him instantly to the seclusion of 
some sacred retreat ; by the direct training of saints, 
and holding up in visible contrast with the prevalent 
pursuit of earthly shadows an order of men wholly 
dedicated to heavenly realities. To this must suc- 
ceed the positive task of watching over the duty of 
Christians in the two related particulars of faith and 
obedience; preserving perfect uniformity of language, 
without the slightest allowance of individual dis- 
cretion, in the statement of doctrine ; constantly pre- 
senting, the historical Christ of the Gospels to the 
people as their God, who created them one by one, 
who is closely present with them, and knows their 
thoughts ; and habituating them daily to the phrases 
expressive of the two great truths of Revelation, — 
" Three Persons, one God," — " One Person, two 
Natures." As a disciplinary institution, the Church 
must not only provide a sublime and beautiful ritual, 
" such as the Spirit himself has suggested to the be- 
loved bride of Christ," but must adapt her methods 
of influence with versatile skill to the several classes 
of society. The poor are her especial charge, to 
whom she must never rest till full justice has been 
done. Such of their employments as are incom- 
patible with the Christian life she must detect and 
prohibit. Their oppressors, however powerful, must 
be sternly denounced. Their day of rest must be 
guarded, and refreshed by a religious ceremonial in- 
vested with every beauty that may touch and solem- 
nize their hearts. The rich, too, must be warned of 
their temptations, not only by direct resistance and 



CHURCH AND STATE. 



115 



reproof to the desire of wealth, but by examples of 
cheerful and voluntary poverty. And the educated 
must be saved from the dangers of corrupt admira- 
tions and a mere diabolical acuteness, by imparting 
in early life the Catholic rather than the Classical 
idea of heroism ; and throughout his course keeping 
the student closely implicated in habit with the dis- 
cipline and offices of the Church. 

Perhaps the hardest task imposed by Mr. Ward 
upon his Church is, to maintain supremacy over the 
thought of society. For this end he requires her to 
create a new literature and philosophy, antagonistic 
to that which, he complains, the spread and advance- 
ment of knowledge has put into the hands of un- 
believers. She must find a way of prevailing over 
the apparent results of the modern criticism and 
exegesis ; must relieve the Old Testament of the 
difficulties with which historical research painfully 
oppresses it ; must harmonize the Hebrew cosmogo- 
ny with the discoveries of modern science ; and, in 
order to guide the reaction against the infidel phi- 
losophy of the last century, must produce a new sys- 
tem of metaphysics, capable of coping with the 
subtlety of Protestant analysis, and of giving a sci- 
entific basis to the Catholic system. Finally, the 
influence of the Church over the body politic must be 
obtained, not by aspiring to the direct administration 
of State affairs, but by proclaiming the application 
of Christian principles to political government; by 
denouncing State sins; by guiding the popular 
eagerness for redress. Nor are more positive inter- 
positions to be avoided. Rules must be made for 



116 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

almsgiving, to correct the cold-hearted morality of 
economists. It must be authoritatively settled what 
causes a barrister may plead, — what books a book- 
seller may distribute. And above all, the education 
of the people must be undertaken by the Church, 
and a subsequent control over their habits be main- 
tained, with a special view to counteract the evils, 
mental and moral, arising from the excessive division 
of labor. All these duties devolve upon ecclesiastics, 
not by delegation from the State, but by super- 
natural appointment from God. Their long neglect 
is to be deplored with a greater sorrow than for any 
unfaithfulness towards men : and they are to be 
resumed with the consciousness of an authority 
above the law. 

From this imperfect sketch of Mr. Ward's " Ideal," 
it will be evident that, with him, the Church is con- 
stituted wherever the clergy exist : that its origin is 
higher than that of society, and its rights beyond the 
reach of the consentaneous will of men ; that the 
sphere of its power is coextensive with human life, 
and embraces, therefore, the whole range of the 
State's activity ; that it may not, unless through the 
law, enforce its claims by the temporal sword, but 
may cut off offenders from communion with divine 
mercy ; may " declare war in the name of the Lord 
against wickedness in high worldly places, and draw 
the spiritual sword which has so long rusted in its 
scabbard." (p. 437.) 

We know of no living writer, of any reputation 
as a thinker, who has proved so little, and disproved 
so much, as Archbishop Whately. And on no one 



CHURCH AND STATE. 117 

of his works is his negative mode of treatment more 
impressed than on the Essay now before us. We 
close it with the clearest knowledge of what the 
kingdom of Christ is not; of the powers which its 
ministers must disown ; of the purposes they can- 
not serve; of the spurious origin of almost every 
thing that occurs to the mind when the Church sys- 
tem is spoken of, catechisms, creeds, articles, liturgy, 
sacramental forms, ordination, rubrics, canons, and 
episcopacy itself. But of any high and holy ends 
worthy of a divine institution ; of any principle of 
unity connecting its parts into a spiritual whole ; of 
the nature of the vital activity which should pervade 
the organism of the Church, and its relation to the 
other forces which determine the phenomena of 
society, — the faintest possible conception is given. 
As the temple, with its metropolitan priesthood, is 
the type of Mr. Ward's Church ; so is the municipal 
synagogue, with its lay officers, of Dr. Whately's. 
Our Lord determined to gather his disciples after 
his departure into local societies. In the constitu- 
tion of these, the practice of the synagogue was 
naturally followed: for there it was that the Apos- 
tolic missionaries first sought a hearing : and if they 
failed to convince the majority of the assembly, so 
that the synagogue became a church, the converted 
minority, on their secession, followed in their new 
combination the model with which they were fa- 
miliar. Hence in the earliest Christian communi- 
ties, the deacons, the presbyters, the bishops, had like 
duties with the officers of the same designation in a 
Jewish association of worshippers. The effect of 



118 MARTINEAtj's MISCELLANIES. 

this statement on the pretensions of the ecclesiastical 
body is evident. The several societies of disciples 
may claim a direct sanction from Christ, since he 
distinctly provided for their formation ; but he took 
no notice of the functionaries who were to admin- 
ister their affairs ; and that they exist at all, arises 
only from the wants and convenience of the associa- 
tions which they represent; every society having its 
officers, its rules, its terms of membership. And as for 
the particular nature of the offices thus created, that 
grew naturally out of an historical antecedent which 
cannot possibly impart to it any superhuman authori- 
ty : for, whatever obscurity hangs over the origin of 
the Hebrew synagogues, they certainly cannot be 
referred to the Mosaic law, or to any causes higher 
than the human will. Hence a Church is a " con- 
gregation of faithful men," to which the clergyman 
is but an appendage, with title depending on his 
being the " regularly appointed officer of a regular 
Christian community." Each society, moreover, is 
as wholly independent of the rest, as the synagogue 
of Athens from that of Caesarea ; connected indeed 
by sympathy, and at liberty to establish a federal 
combination with others ; but no longer bound by 
such organization, when it fails to accomplish its 
appointed end. The Church has accordingly no 
unity but in name ; it is wholly provincial, and has 
no visible head, either individual or collective. And 
whatever range of discretion may be left as to the 
functions of the clergy, one thing is absolutely ex- 
cluded by the very religion which they serve : they 
have no templar and sacerdotal duties, can offer no 



CHURCH AND STATE. 119 

sacrifice, absolve from no sin, and stand between no 
man and his God. And even in the prosecution of 
its legitimate ends, the Church must wholly abstain 
from secular coercion, as an encroachment on the 
" things that are Caesar's," and alien to the spirit of 
a religion whose " kingdom is not of this world." 
All temporal sanctions are replaced in Christian 
societies by the sanctions of the world to come. 
This it is which, according to Archbishop Whately, 
constitutes the spirituality of the kingdom of Christ. 
We must protest, in passing, against this prevalent 
but gross abuse of the word spiritual. It does not 
denote a mere far-sighted self-interest, in opposition 
to the narrow calculations of a worldly mind ; but 
is the name of a higher order of motive than any 
prudence, long or short. Action which proceeds 
from personal hope or fear is wholly unspiritual : 
the nearness or remoteness of the pleasure or pain 
contemplated does not alter the moral quality, but 
only the sagacity, of the agent's determination : he 
makes an investment, in the one case for a quick 
return, in the other giving credit on good security ; 
in both the transaction is strictly mercantile. Were 
this the difference between the foundation of the 
State and that of the Church, then political society 
would be like a partnership for prosecuting a home 
trade with cash payments ; while Christian society 
would resemble a joint-stock company for colonizing 
some antipodal region, that, after the judicious out- 
lay of years, might yield, not the profits of a shop, 
but the revenue of a commonwealth. It is the re- 
mark of Coleridge, that, whether a " man expects the 



120 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

auto da fe, the fire and fagots, with which he is 
threatened, to take place at Lisbon or Smithfield, or 
in some dungeon in the centre of the earth, makes 
no difference in the kind of motive by which he is in- 
fluenced ; nor of course in the nature of the power 
which acts on his passions by means of it." * That 
influence alone is spiritual which awakens the con- 
sciousness of obligation and the sentiments of wor- 
ship. 

To sum up, then, the leading particulars of Arch- 
bishop "Whately's theory. The end of the Church 
is to enforce the moral law, as recognized among 
Christians, by the sanctions of a future life. The 
end of the State is the protection of person and 
property by the use of temporal sanctions. In both 
cases the institutions derive their existence from the 
component members, over whom the functionaries 
have no authority beyond that which belongs to reg- 
ular official appointment. And all questions as to 
the internal organization of the Church, the mode 
of supporting its cost, and of adjusting its relations 
to the secular government, are open to determination 
by regard to expediency, provided coercion, priest- 
hood, and a visible head be altogether disclaimed. 

In one important respect Dr. Arnold occupies an 
intermediate position between the two writers al- 
ready noticed. In his design of a Church Mr. Ward 
labors for Christendom, Archbishop Whately for a 
congregation, Arnold for a nation. The Christians 
of this realm constitute, in the view of the first, only 

* Church and State, p. 134. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 121 

an integrant part of one vast civitas, conscious of its 
unity ; in that of the second, an aggregate of partic- 
ular communities, forming together a local societas, 
unconscious of its unity, but collected into a class by 
observers from without; in that of the third, one en- 
tire and independent civitas among many within the 
wide circuit of the Christian societas throughout the 
world. This peculiarity, like every other in Arnold's 
theory, is singularly expressive of the character of 
his mind. It was not simply his historical taste, or 
his love of Aristotle, that led him to identify the 
functions of Church and State, and seek in Chris- 
tianity the bond of citizenship to replace the an- 
cient ties of race. Hooker, so induced, had done the 
same ; — with the significant difference, that he nei- 
ther hated a priesthood, nor appreciated the Puritans. 
Arnold's all-prevailing moral nature made him seize 
with avidity, from every age, all the securities for hu- 
man duty which genius had devised or inspiration 
imparted ; and reject with indignation every coun- 
terfeit pretending to do the sterling work of a re- 
sponsible will. He could not, for all his faith in 
revelation, forego one jot of the ancient reverence for 
law; or, for all his high doctrine of obedience, allow 
the priest to touch with one of his fingers the bur- 
den of individual obligation. He would save gov- 
ernment from degenerating into police, and Chris- 
tianity into conjuring ; and he had an unconquerable 
aversion to accept the constable as representative of 
the State, or the bishop of the Church. Both in- 
stitutions were to him but incorporated expressions 
of the conscience of their members ; — the one of its 
11 



122 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

executive energy, the other of its meditative aspira- 
tions ; neither, therefore, having an aim less or more 
comprehensive than the other; neither complete and 
healthy without the other ; and requiring, in order to 
effectuate the ends of either, their coalescence into a 
living unity. The " Fragment on the Church " con- 
tends, no less strenuously and successfully than the 
" Essay on the Kingdom of Christ," against a sacer- 
dotal system, and subordinates the ministry to the 
" congregation of faithful men " : yet with the dif- 
ference that Dr. Whately seems to be stripping the 
clergy of their pretensions ; Dr. Arnold, to be distrib- 
uting to the laity their duties : the one, impatient for 
the abatement of nonsense ; the other, unhappy at 
the usurpation of a trust. Apart, however, from this 
characteristic difference of feeling, there is a perfect 
accordance between the two friends in their nega- 
tive conclusions, as to the internal constitution of 
the Church. Nothing whatever, according to Ar- 
nold, is instituted, except that the disciples shall form 
themselves into communities, for mutual help in du- 
ty, in the same way as mere society is an aid in civ- 
ilization. It is a thing authoritatively settled, that 
there shall be this divine polity of cooperation, for 
bringing the faith of Christ to the masses of men, 
and remedying the extent of the Fall, as individual 
devotedness countervails its intensity. But as to the 
modes by which this association shall conduct its 
contest against moral evil, and the scheme of or- 
ganization by which its parts shall be maintained in 
active unity, all is left open to the discretion of suc- 
cessive ages. On this point his language is most 
unqualified : — 



CHURCH AND STATE. 123 

" In matters of doctrine, an opinion, however unimpor- 
tant, is either true or false ; and if false, he who holds it is 
in error, although the error may be so practically indif- 
ferent as to be of no account in our estimate of the men. 
But in matters of government, I hold that there is actually no 
right and no wrong. Viewed in the large, as they are seen 
in India, and when abstracted from the questions of particu- 
lar countries, I hold that one form of Church government is 
exactly as much according to Christ's will as another ; nay, 
I consider such questions as so indifferent, that, if I thought 
the government of my neighbor's Church better than my 
own, I yet would not, unless the case were very strong, 
leave my Church for his, because habits, associations, and 
all those minor ties which ought to burst asunder before a 
great call, are yet of more force, I think, than a difference 
between Episcopacy and Presbytery, unless one be very 
good of its kind, and the other very bad." — Life, Vol. II. 
p. 105. 

The only material point on which Arnold dissent- 
ed from the opinions expressed in Whately's Es- 
says was the right of the Church to wield the tem- 
poral sword. And this, as it appears to us, was a 
difference more in words than in reality, and re- 
solved itself into the question, whether the power 
which enforced the laws in a Christian country 
should be called the State or the Church. Arnold 
was as far as his friend from claiming coercive pre- 
rogatives for either ecclesiastical officers or worship- 
ping assemblies : all judicial and executive authority 
he would leave where now it rests: only he would 
regard the functionaries who exercise it as deputed, 
not by the material interests, but by the moral sense 
of the community, and standing for the law of 



124 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

Christ by which all are bound. This ascription of a 
sacred character to authorized and constitutional rul- 
ers is all that Arnold meant by his desire to make 
" the Church a sovereign society." He wanted, not 
more power to the Church, but a more Christian tem- 
per to the State. He could not endure that any 
part of life should escape the reach of obligation; 
that the process of social organization should be 
thought to give rise, at any step, to relations exempt 
from moral inspection ; that any voluntary deeds 
between citizen and citizen, between subjects and 
rulers, between the commonwealth and foreign states, 
should be treated as less amenable to the divine rule 
of conscience, than the private conduct which is 
abandoned wholly to its sway. Hence he was im- 
patient of the false distinction between " secular " 
and " spiritual " things ; under cover of which he be- 
lieved that countless questionable ways of thought 
and act passed without a just verdict, or even an in- 
quiring challenge, and whole provinces of life were 
ceded as irreclaimable for Christian cultivation. He 
felt how untruly this distinction presents the real 
difference between the pursuit of physical and that of 
moral good, as if they were each a separate business, 
to be achieved in society by different agents, in indi- 
viduals by different acts. As in the case of private 
persons there are not two sets of employments, one 
irresponsibly abandoned to the natural desires, the 
other the exclusive realm of duty; but moral good 
consists in the regulated pursuit of natural good ac- 
cording to a divine and holy law : so in communi- 
ties there are not two spheres of work and office, 



CHURCH AND STATE. 125 

one with only physical ends, the other with only 
spiritual ; but all parts of the body politic must 
serve one supreme intent, viz. that the whole natural 
life of society shall also be a moral life. Arnold, ac- 
cordingly, with adventurous nobleness, insisted on 
carrying the Christian standard through every depart- 
ment of the state : sovereign and council, judges and 
ministers, legislators and magistrates, were to regard 
themselves as functionaries of a Christian church. 
Nay, he did not shrink from applying his principle 
to the province of government most difficult to re- 
duce under the rule of truth, honesty, and justice, — 
we mean, the foreign relations of the commonwealth. 
He had no idea of leaving, in diplomacy, a privileged 
nest of retreat for chicanery and fraud; or in war 
itself, a licensed escape from moral obligation. In all 
questions between nation and nation, in the con- 
duct of all disputes, and the resistance of aggres- 
sion, there actually exists a right and a wrong : and 
is it for Christian men to throw up these things in 
confusion and despair, and bid conscience turn the 
back till they have scrambled through a crisis they 
cannot manage by her rules? He was not to be 
scared, therefore, by any amount of Machiavellian 
practice, from including ambassadors, army, and na- 
vy in the staff of his national Church. They were 
all instruments in that contest with moral evil, and 
pressure towards the highest good, which formed the 
true cpyov of every Christian community, and must 
share alike the responsibility and the dignity of their 
association with such a work. Arnold would have 
heartily adopted his favorite Aristotle's estimate of 
11* 



126 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

the religious character of wise and thoughtful sway, 
when he identified the rule of reason and law in 
states with the authority of God, and said that, to al- 
low scope for the unregulated will of governors, was 
to give power to the brute.* Of this sentiment, in- 
deed, the following passage from the " Fragment" is 
little more than a Christian amplification : — 

" It is obvious that, the object of Christian society being 
thus extensive, and relating not to ritual observances, but 
to the improvement of the whole of our life, the natural 
and fit state of the Church is, that it should be a sovereign 
society or commonwealth ; as long as it is subordinate and 
municipal, it cannot fully carry its purposes into effect. This 
will be evident, if we consider that law and government 
are the sovereign influences on human society ; that they 
in the last resort shape and control it at their pleasure ; that 
institutions depend on them, and are by them formed and 
modified ; that what they sanction will ever be generally 
considered innocent ; that what they condemn is thereby 
made a crime, and if persisted in becomes rebellion ; and 
that those who hold in their hands the power of life and 
death must be able greatly to obstruct the progress of 
whatever they disapprove of; and those who dispose of all 
the honors and rewards of society must, in the same way, 
be greatly able to advance whatever they think excellent. 
So long, then, as the sovereign society is not Christian, and 
the Church is not sovereign, we have two powers alike de- 
signed to act upon the whole of pur being, but acting often 
in opposition to each other. Of these powers, the one has 

* 'O fl€V OVV TOV VOVV KcXcVODV cip%€lV doKcl KcXciKDV apytlV TOV 

Qebv kcu tovs vofiovs, 6 §' av6p<x)7rov KeXevcoi/ TrpoarriOrjcri Kai Qrjpiop, 
— Polit. HI. 16. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 127 

wisdom, the other external force and influence ; and from 
the division of these things, which ought ever to go together, 
the wisdom of the Church cannot carry into effect the truths 
which it sees and loves ; whilst the power of government, 
not being guided by wisdom, influences society for evil 
rather than for good. The natural and true state of things 
then is, that this power and this wisdom should be united : 
that human life should not be pulled to pieces between two 
claimants, each pretending to exercise control over it, not 
in some particular portion, but universally ; that wisdom 
should be armed with power, power guided by wisdom ; 
that the Christian Church should have no external force to 
thwart its beneficent purposes ; that government should not 
be poisoned by its internal ignorance or wickedness, and 
thus advance the cause of God's enemy, rather than per- 
form the part of God's vicegerent." — Ch. I. p. 10. 

It is impossible, in reading this passage, not to be 
reminded of the well-known saying of Plato, that 
there can be no cessation of ills to states, or, gener- 
ally, to the human race, unless either philosophers 
become their kings, or their so-called kings and rulers 
become true philosophers ; and unless such a coales- 
cence takes place between political power and philo- 
sophic wisdom, that natures devoted to either, at the 
expense of the other, are for the most part expressly 
excluded from public affairs.* To Arnold, " so natu- 

# 'Eav fir) rj ol (j)iX6(ro<poi jBaaikevcraHnv iv reus irokeariv, r) ol 
fiao-iKrjs T€ vvv Xeyd/xei/ot kcll bwaaraL <fii\o(ro<fir)<TCQ(ri yvrjalcos re 

KCLL IKaVCDS) KCU TOVTO els TOVTOV ^V/lKear], dwdflLS T€ TToXlTLKT} KOI 

(j>i\o(ro(f)ia, t£>v 6e vvv TropevoyLtvav , x.cop\s icj)* eKarepov ai noXkal 
(j)v(T€Ls e£' avdyKrjs a7ro/cXeto-#ooo-£i/, ovk eart kcik<ov navXa, 2> (plXe 
TXavKoav, rals 7rdXe(7t, Sokcd 8e ovdt tco dvdp(07TiV(o yem. — De Kep. 
V. c. 18. 



128 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

ral was the union of religion with justice, that (he 
thought) we may boldly deem there is neither, where 
both are not " * And he held to the conclusion so 
impressively stated by Hooker : — 

" Seeing, therefore, it doth thus appear that the safety of 
all estates dependeth upon religion ; that religion unfeign- 
edly loved perfecteth men's abilities unto all kinds of virtu- 
ous services in the commonwealth; that men's desire in 
general is to hold no religion but the true ; and that what- 
soever good effects do grow out of their religion who em- 
brace, instead of the true a false, the roots thereof are 
sparks of the light of truth, intermingled with the darkness 
of error, — because no religion can wholly and only con- 
sist of untruths, — we have reason to think that all true 
virtues are to honor true religion as their parent, and all 
well-ordered commonweals to love her as their chiefest 
stay." — Eccl Pol, B. 5, § 1. 

The views of Arnold, as to the perfect identity of 
aim in Church and State, set him directly at vari- 
ance with the philosophy of his political party, and 
the theology of his ecclesiastical order. He could 
keep no terms with Warburton's principle, generally 
received by the Whigs, that — ■ 

" It was the care of the bodies, not the souls, of men 
that the magistrate undertook to give account of. Whatever, 
therefore, refers to the body is in his jurisdiction ; whatever 
to the soul is not." — Alliance between Church and State, 
B. 1, Ch. 4. 

He maintained that, if this were so, the State 
could not be a " sovereign society " ; inasmuch as 
there would be interests above its reach, and exempt 

* Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, B. 5, § 1. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 129 

from its command ; and that, as there is such a thing 
as spiritual good, which, in the form of personal per- 
fection, constitutes the highest end of individuals, 
so can nothing less than this good, in the form of a 
moral civilization, present a true aim for the col- 
lective will of a community. He therefore regarded 
every thing as within the province of the State, 
which might elevate the life of its people ; and held 
it the duty of government to provide for their edu- 
cation, to afford expression for their worship, to 
superintend the construction of their dwellings and 
the organization of their towns, and to control, with 
a view to moral results, the distribution of employ- 
ments which might arise from the unrestrained op- 
eration of economical laws. While he separated 
himself thus from " the liberals," by asserting for the 
commonwealth higher aims than corporeal, he stood 
almost alone among ecclesiastics in denying to 
Christianity any function that was ritual. Religion 
and government met on the common ground of 
moral life, — the life of responsible man, not of a 
sentient creature on the one hand, or of a magi- 
cal saint on the other. In short, from both ex- 
tremities he dismissed all physical ends, simply as 
such ; whether of the zoological kind, giving animal 
ease for this world, or of the theological kind, pro- 
viding an -enchanted safety for the next. His theory 
would have been complete and self-consistent, if he 
could have adhered to his conception of the purely 
moral character of Christianity; and asked for no 
more, in his definition of a disciple, than a certain 
state of the conscience and affections. But this was 



130 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

impossible. Dealing with the Newmanites, he boldly 
vindicates a spiritual Gospel against a ceremonial. 
Dealing with Unitarians, he cannot allow a spiritual 
Gospel against a doctrinal. And were it even other- 
wise, the difficulty of managing this new ingredient 
of belief cannot be overcome. Do what you will to 
give exclusive prominence to the moral element of 
Christianity, still, when all that is " sacramental" is 
cancelled, and the minimum of creed is spared, it 
does not become identical with the law of con- 
science ; it requires assent to some things not neces- 
sarily obvious to every man of good and honest 
heart; there is yet a residue of certain historical 
propositions to be embraced, to impose which as a 
condition of citizenship is certainly to exceed your 
prerogative as guardian of the moral life of the 
community. Arnold did not shrink from the prac- 
tical consequences of his own scheme; he strenu- 
ously advocated the application of a theological test 
as a means of discriminating aliens from citizens ; 
he resisted the removal of the Jewish disabilities; 
he wished to enforce a Scriptural examination in the 
London University; he "would thank Parliament 
for having done away with distinctions between 
Christian and Christian," but " would pray that dis- 
tinctions be kept up between Christians and non- 
Christians." * He struggled hard, but, in our opinion, 
ineffectually, to reconcile this adoption of a State 
creed with his principle that " union of action," not 
" union in belief," should constitute the social bond. 

* Life, Vol. II. p. 32. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 131 

In one mood, he maintained that every society " has 
a right to establish its own ideas " ; * but if so, it 
"chooses for its end truth, rather than good," — the 
very thing which he emphatically condemns.! At 
another time, he denies that the reception of Chris- 
tianity implies any belief in " the truth of a prop- 
osition," and treats it as a purely practical allegiance, 
which any man may render at will, to a law of con- 
duct; and in defence of this position, he adduces 
the example of the early Christians, among whom 
were some members " not even believing that there 
would be a resurrection of the dead." Then, if so, 
with what consistency could Dr. Arnold draw up a 
creed for the express purpose of defining the amount 
of belief sufficient to make a British citizen? He 
protests against Mr. Gladstone's doctrine, that the 
propagation and maintenance of "religious truth" 
are to be admitted among the proper ends of gov- 
ernment; and considers himself as defending the 
very different proposition, that "man's highest per- 
fection " should be the final aim of the State. J But 
by including among the indispensable elements of 
human " perfection " a certain portion of " religious," 
and even historical " truth," he borrows the funda- 
mental principle of the very theory he confutes, and 
lays himself open to every objection which can be 
brought against it, except as to the extent of its ex- 
clusiveness. There is not a consequence deducible 



* Life, Vol. H. p. 38. 

t Lectures on Modern History, Vol. I.-, Appendix, p. 50. 

X Ibid., p. 52. 



132 MARTINEAtr's MISCELLANIES. 

from Mr. Gladstone's scheme, as to the treatment of 
dissidents, which does not equally follow from Dr. 
Arnold's, — with only the difference, that the suf- 
ferers are less numerous. The revival of a test-act, 
the enforcement of the law of religious libel, the 
punishment of active heresy as lawless disaffection, 
are direct practical corollaries from a theory which 
inserts the New Testament among the statutes at 
large, and commits the estates of the realm to the 
maintenance of its authority in faith and practice. 
The truth is, Arnold's free and true nature led him 
to adopt in feeling the moral and affectionate con- 
ception of Christianity, as a simple aspiration to- 
wards the ideal of character presented in its records. 
But when, no longer reposing in the interior of this 
conception, he attempted to reach its boundary, and 
determine the external relations of the religion, he 
found that his definition must take in certain ele- 
ments of theological belief; and what was meant to 
discriminate good from evil turned out to be the old 
barrier between orthodox and heretic. 

Such was the snare by which Arnold's divinity 
contrived to trip up his philosophy. That he fell 
into it is the more remarkable, because, in a work to 
which he frequently refers, Coleridge had set a signal 
example of its avoidance. The three writers whom 
we have already analyzed have treated, under the 
name " Church" exclusively of the organization of 
Christian communities. To these they have referred 
the whole spiritual work of society, and have omit- 
ted all notice of any other possible forms which may 
be assumed by the agents of the higher culture of 



CHURCH AND STATE. 133 

man. Accordingly, in defining the proper constitu- 
tion of these agencies, their final appeal has been to 
Scripture and ecclesiastical experience; with their 
several methods of skill they have extracted a model 
thence, and never doubted that this would meet the 
exigencies of all commonwealths worthy to attract 
our speculations. This assumption, however natural 
to divines, is not satisfactory to the philosopher. He 
cannot but remember that human nature is older, 
and human population more widely spread, than 
Christianity ; that one race, one half of the authentic 
annals, and one third of the present numbers of man- 
kind, exhaust all that is characteristic of Christen- 
dom ; that the religion itself, as a social element, is 
but one phenomenon of that Mind and Conscience 
which governed life in the times of Abraham and 
Zoroaster, of Solon and Confucius, of Socrates and 
Numa, of Cato and Cratippus, no less than in those 
of Cyprian, Gregory, and Luther. In constructing a 
system of social philosophy, a securer and a wider 
basis must be laid than can be found in the historical 
phenomena, however instructive, of a particular pe- 
riod, however extended : and the foundation sought 
in the elementary tendencies and inherent instincts 
of that human nature which runs through all pe- 
riods, and produces all histories. Coleridge has not 
precisely done this ; but he has raised himself far 
above the ecclesiastical point of view. He has 
evolved his " Idea " of a Church from a survey of 
nations so vast that Christianity appears as only one 
of many religions illustrating its application. In the 
practice of the Semitic race on the one hand, and of 
12 



134 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

the Kelts, Scandinavians, and Goths on the other, 
he finds a principle involved, by which at once to 
justify the existence and to try the efficiency of a 
National Church. All these tribes, constituting the 
stirps generosa seu historica of the world, divided the 
land of each country which they occupied into two 
portions, neither of which were to be abandoned as 
possessions to arbitrary self-will, apart from all duties 
attached as conditions of enjoyment. One of these 
portions comprised the heritable lots, or propriety, 
whose fiduciary character implied only private obli- 
gations, necessarily left in detail to the conscience of 
the individual, but secretly watched over by the con- 
science of the community. The other constituted 
a nationalty, or inalienable reserve for perpetual in- 
come, in which only life-interests were allowed, con- 
ditional on the performance of certain official ser- 
vices* The purpose of this public endowment was 
to provide for that higher culture of the citizens, 
without which civilization can make no advance, 
and even enjoy no stability. The end was to be 
obtained by the maintenance in perpetuity of a 
clerisij) — not constituting a priesthood, or dedicated 
to either ritual or doctrinal offices, but furnishing, 
first, a class of students for enlarging the range of 

* It will occur to some of our readers that a similar bi-partition of 
the land is recommended by Aristotle ; the public rents being applied 
to the expenses of government, the public meals (serving in part the 
purpose of a poor-rate), and the maintenance of public worship. Ta npos 
rovs Beovs haivavr]\xaTa kolvcl irdcrrjs rrjs 7roXea>y icmv. avayKalov 
rolvvv els $vo fieprj diyprjo-Bat, rrjv x&pav, Ka\ ttjV p.ev elvai koivtjv, 
rr\v he rcbv IbitoTcov. — Polit. VII. 10. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 135 

knowledge; next, a class of instructors for effect- 
ing its distribution. 

" A certain smaller number were to remain at the foun- 
tain-heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging 
the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the 
interests of physical and moral science ; being likewise the 
instructors of such as constituted, or were to constitute, the 
remaining more numerous classes of the order. The mem- 
bers of this latter, and far more numerous body, were to 
be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave 
even the smallest integral part or division without a resident 
guide, guardian, and instructor ; the objects and final inten- 
tion of the whole order being these, — to preserve the 
stores and to guard the treasures of past civilization, and 
thus to bind the present with the past ; to perfect and add 
to the same, and thus to connect the present with the 
future ; but especially to diffuse through the whole com- 
munity, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, 
that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indis- 
pensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for 
the performance of the duties correspondent ; finally, to 
secure for the nation, if not a superiority over the neighbor- 
ing states, yet an equality at least, in that character of gen- 
eral civilization, which, equally with, or rather more than, 
fleets, armies, and revenue, forms the ground of its defen- 
sive and offensive power." — Church and State, Ch. V. 
p. 46. 

The true end for which this educated and edu- 
cating class is created, and that on which alone the 
State has a right to insist, is the training of citizens 
in the essentials of the social character, — the dif- 
fusion among the people of "legality, that is, the 
obligations of a well-calculated self-interest, under 



136 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

the conditions of a common interest determined by- 
common laws." (p. 58.) The provisions for this 
national culture may be wholly detached from the 
institutions of the Christian Church : they vested, 
among the Hebrews, in the Levites, among the 
Kelts, in the Druids, before Christendom existed: 
and in countries of mixed religions, either receiv- 
ing the advance or witnessing the retreat of Chris- 
tianity, they could not be identified with an ecclesi- 
astical system having only partial contact with the 
people. In some respects they have to accomplish 
more, in others vastly less, than falls within the prov- 
ince of the Church of Christ upon the same spot ; 
— - more, inasmuch as they must include the support, 
not of theology and morals alone, but of all the sci- 
ences, not omitting those which sustain the lay pro- 
fessions of law and medicine ; — less, because they 
are content with forming good subjects for the com- 
monwealth, and stop short of the high aim at per- 
fection through the whole inner and outer life of 
individuals. The functions, therefore, of the national 
clerisy are truly distinct from those of the Christian 
clergy: and in relation to the Church of the body 
politic, " Christianity is a blessed accident, a provi- 
dential boon." (p. 59.) Whether, the functions 
being different, the functionaries can ever with ad- 
vantage be the same, must depend on historical con- 
ditions present in one age, absent in another. The 
circumstances under which Christian institutions 
developed themselves in the earlier period of Eng- 
lish history, rendered them in every way the fittest 
depositaries of the national trust. They were the 



CHURCH AND STATE. 137 

centres of all the intellectual and spiritual light 
which ages of violence had left unquenched. No 
physical science, no mental skill, no moral art, had 
yet disengaged itself from their fostering shelter. 
They comprehended — 

" All the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the posses- 
sion and application of which constitute the civilization of 
a country, as well as the theological. The last was indeed 
placed at the head of all ; and of good right did it claim 
the precedence. But why ? Because, under the name of 
theology or divinity were contained the interpretation of 
languages, the conservation and tradition of past events, 
the momentous epochs and revolutions of the race and 
nation, the continuation of the records, logic, ethics, and 
the determination of ethical science, in application to the 
rights and duties of men in all their various relations, 
social and civil ; and last, the ground-knowledge, the prima 
scientia as it was named, — philosophy, or the doctrine and 
discipline of ideas." — p. 49. 

At a time when the Christian Church in the na- 
tion failed of no function appropriate to the Clerisy 
of the nation, ecclesiastics were naturally taken as 
the Officiaries also of the national Church. That 
they were ministers of a religion which, besides 
securing the civil ends, went on to accomplish some- 
thing more and better, did not disqualify them for 
their State trust. It is only needful that their work 
should comprise an instruction of the people in legal 
obligations. 

" Whatever of higher origin and nobler and wider aim 
the ministers of the national Church, in some other capacity, 
and in the performance of other duties, might labor to im- 
12* 



138 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

plant and cultivate in the minds and hearts of their congre- 
gations and seminaries, should include the practical conse- 
quences of the legality above mentioned. The State 
requires that the basin should be kept full, and that the 
stream which supplies the hamlet and turns the mill, and 
waters the meadow-fields, should be fed and kept flowing. 
If this be done, the State is content, indifferent for the rest, 
whether the basin be filled by the spring in its first ascent, 
and rising but a hand's-breadth above the bed ; or whether, 
drawn from a more elevated source, shooting aloft in a 
stately column, that reflects the light of heaven from its 
shaft, and bears the Iris, call decus, promissumque Jovis 
lucidum on its spray, it fills the basin in its descent." — 
p. 59. 

The fitness, however, of the ecclesiastical body 
for the State task confided to thern diminished in 
proportion as their power assumed more prominently 
a sacerdotal character, and their influence was ex- 
erted rather on the superstitious fears, than on the 
reason and conscience, of the people. When at 
length they lost all patriotic ties, and merely resided 
on the land, as members of a cosmopolitan priest- 
hood under allegiance to a foreign head, the grossest 
abuses of trust occurred. Large portions of the 
heritable lands of the country were absorbed into 
the Nationalty, by bequests dictated in ghostly fear : 
and, on the other side, masses were sacrilegiously 
alienated from the Nationalty by those who were 
only its life-trustees. The true " Idea " of the Eng- 
lish Reformation — though never worked out — 
was to right the balance thus disturbed, and to re- 
impose upon the clergy the neglected conditions 



CHURCH AND STATE. 139 

required of them as functionaries of the common- 
wealth. The Nationalty should accordingly have 
been allotted to the maintenance, (1.) of the Uni- 
versities, and great schools of liberal learning ; (2.) of 
a pastor or parson (persona, exemplar of the per- 
sonal character) in every parish ; (3.) of a school- 
master in every parish, — who might succeed to the 
pastorate; (4.) of the poor, from age or sickness; 
(5.) of the Church and School buildings. How far 
the miserably imperfect results of the Reformation in 
England constitute an unfitness in the Church of 
England for any longer performing the duties of the 
National Clerisy, Coleridge nowhere declares his 
opinion. Writing with a special reference to the 
Catholic Emancipation Act, he enumerates only the 
disqualifications for this trust peculiar to the Ro- 
man priests, viz. allegiance to a foreign power, and 
compulsory celibacy, in connection with an anti- 
national head. But his principles manifestly imply 
that the State may at any time vest the Nationalty 
in the body of men — be they who they may— • 
best fitted to realize its proper ends; and if, from 
changes either in themselves, or in the community 
around them, the Clergy no longer represent and 
guide the intellect and conscience of the nation at 
large, either new orders of Educators may be added 
to them as the complement of their defects, or they 
may be wholly discarded in favor of a Clerisy of 
lay-instructors. 

The utter contempt of " vested interests," and even 
disregard of individuals, in contemplation of the 
public weal, which marked this conception of the 



140 

Church, are no less apparent in Coleridge's Theory 
of the State. He looks upon society, not in Arnold's 
way, as composed of persons, but as a combination 
of class interests and tendencies; while the persons 
change, like the atoms of an animate body, these, 
like its essential organs, remain through all its 
growth and activity, and constitute the functional 
powers, whose deranged or concentaneous operation 
determines the death or life of communities. He 
resolves the total well-being of a State into two ele- 
mentary interests, — that of Permanence, represented 
by the landed property of a country, held (1.) by 
the Major Barons or Peers ; (2.) by the Minor 
Barons or Gentry: and that of Progression, repre- 
sented by its Personalty, under the several heads of, 
(1.) the manufacturing people in towns ; (2.) the 
commercial, in ports ; (3.) the distributive ; (4.) the 
professional. The negative end of all the activity 
of the State is, to guard the interests and concerns 
of the whole Proprietage, whether landed or per- 
sonal ; and even the protection of life and limb is an 
object of care only in so far as it is involved in this. 
But when this negative end has been attained, there 
still "remain its positive ends: (1.) to make the 
means of subsistence more easy to each individual ; 
(2.) to secure to each of its members the hope of 
bettering his own condition or that of his children ; 
(3.) the development of those faculties which are 
essential to his humanity, that is, to his rational and 
moral being." * It is evident from this that, in his 

* Lay Sermons, p. 415. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 141 

estimate of the proper functions of a State, Cole- 
ridge occupies an intermediate position between 
Whately and Arnold ; embracing within its ends 
more than the negative system of the former, and 
less than the full Christian Polity of the latter. 
While he would not restrain the State to a mere 
work of police, he does not require it to become an 
instrument and help to the special perfecting of pri- 
vate life, demanding of it, not " those degrees of in- 
tellectual cultivation which distinguish man from 
man in the same civilized society, but those only 
that raise the civilized man above the barbarian, the 
savage, and the brute." * Arnold nowhere gives us, 
so far as we remember, a hint of any thing which 
his State, alias Church, can not do : he affirms every- 
where that it covers the whole ground of human 
life : no portion of the energy of individuals is left 
afloat for independent action ; but all is merged into 
the organization of the body politic or the body 
ecclesiastic. Coleridge, on the other hand, declares 
it essential to the well-being of the commonwealth, 
that there should be a reserve of latent power in the 
hands of individuals, and that this shall be main- 
tained in due proportion to the embodied power of 
the State. He deprecates the loss of individuality 
which takes place in absolute monarchies and in 
absolute republics, — in the one case by autocratic 
annihilation, in the other by democratic absorption 
of private characteristics : and justly refers the prac- 
tical freedom of the English people to the fact that 

* Lay Sermons, p. 415. 



142 

they have not delegated their whole power to the Par- 
liament and sovereign. This point secured, there is 
but one other condition on which the healthy action 
of the State depends ; viz. that there be a due pro- 
portion between the real social influence of its sev- 
eral classes and interests, and their recognized politi- 
cal power. If the Permanent and Progressive ele- 
ments have their relative forces adjusted in one way 
in society, and in quite another in the legislature ; 
if any class has risen into possession of influential 
wealth, without admission into the public franchises ; 
or if intellect and skill obtain direct entrance to 
administrative offices, without any of the securities 
afforded by cognizable possession ; this rule is vio- 
lated, and the equilibrium of social functions is dis- 
turbedL It may be observed, however, that where 
the conditions of w T ell-being in communities seem to 
be hopelessly absent, a spontaneous compensation 
takes place, till the requisite element has had time 
to unfold itself. Thus Coleridge himself remarks, 
that while the Progressive interest in our own coun- 
try lay yet undeveloped, the Church in a great degree 
performed its functions and supplied its place ; coun- 
teracting feudal tyranny and relaxing the severity of 
vassalage ; holding forth the benefits of knowledge 
and the means of future civilization ; and, by open- 
ing in its monasteries an asylum for fugitive depend- 
ents and oppressed franklins, becoming the nursery 
of towns. We would add, that at this moment a 
striking illustration of the same principle of compen- 
sation is working itself out before our eyes. It is 
undeniable that among the disorders of our English 



CHURCH AND STATE. 143 

State we must reckon it not the least, that the Pro- 
gressive interest has not political power at all in 
proportion to its free life and energy in society ; and 
that the " clear and effectual majority of the lower 
House," provided for it in the theory of the Consti- 
tution, has been shifted into the opposite scale. Of 
this disorder the obstinate maintenance of the corn- 
laws and the game-laws are the plainest and most 
irritating symptom. But who can fail to observe 
the healthy natural tendency of this incorrespondency 
to right itself? The elements which have hitherto 
composed the Permanent interest are manifestly un- 
dergoing dissolution. The landed influence has for 
ages included both the owners and the occupiers 
of the soil : and to regard them otherwise than as 
one body would have been considered, a century 
ago, a sign of ignorance and folly. And so it might 
have continued, had the fiduciary character of land- 
ed possession never been forgotten, and had not a 
course of cupidity and ambition on the part of the 
owners reduced the cultivators to a state of depend- 
ence and uncertainty, without any enduring stake 
in the fields of their own tillage. But this very de- 
pendence, this precarious tendency, converts them 
into mere traders ; makes the principles of commer- 
cial exchange not only applicable (which of course 
they must always be) to the produce of their toil, 
but paramount with them over every feeling which 
might otherwise have continued to determine their 
political associations. They are accordingly under- 
going a transference from the landed to the personal 
interest ; learning to regard themselves as mere capi- 



144 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

talists; and acquiring the feelings, the notion of 
rights, the estimate of duties, which characterize that 
class. This we consider to be one of the most mo- 
mentous social changes of our own time : the re- 
moter consequence of which may be, when a system 
of long leases has restored the feeling of indepen- 
dence, to shift the Progressive movement of society, 
now dangerously limited to town populations, back 
among a rural yeomanry, ruled in their political as- 
pirations by a sterling and steady sense of justice, 
rather than by the capricious and self-willed notions 
of liberty that are apt to impel the city multitudes. 

We refrain from following Coleridge through his 
historical illustrations of his theory, from the devel- 
opment of the constitutional powers of the British 
commonwealth. What has been said will suffice to 
present his system of thought in comparison with 
Arnold's ; over which it seems to us to possess two 
prime advantages. On the civil side, it gives a more 
precise and practicable definition of the proper func- 
tions of the State, and removes the negative doc- 
trine, not by verbal arguments about " a sovereign 
society," but by furnishing a positive substitute. On 
the religious side, it has the unique merit of wholly 
separating the National from the Christian Church : 
thus vindicating the principle of public endowment 
for the higher culture of the nation, without impli- 
cating it with theological disputes ; imposing no 
confession of faith as a condition of citizenship ; re- 
quiring no legal definition of Christian essentials ; 
and keeping the staff of government officiaries aloof 
from controversies between Episcopacy and Presby- 






CHURCH AND STATE. 145 

tery, Priests and Preachers. It is curious that Ar- 
nold, with his wide historical view, with his interest 
in modern colonization, with his epistolary connec- 
tions in many lands, should have failed to perceive 
the utter impracticability of his theory in such an 
empire as that of Great Britain. "With Indians and 
half-castes in Canada, with Pagan aborigines in 
New Zealand and Australia, with Hottentots at the 
Cape, with the Buddhists of Ceylon, the Parsees of 
Bombay, the Brahmins of Bengal, and Jews every- 
where, embraced within the sovereignty of England, 
how is it possible to make the profession of Chris- 
tianity a requisite for political rights and civil offices?: 
It is vain to thrust these vast territories out of sight, 
and construct a theory that shall be bounded by the 
British seas. Ecclesiastical and educational institu^ 
tions, direct ramifications from those at home, al- 
ready exist in all our dependencies : an administrative 
system pervades them all: and the relation of the 
natives to these cannot be an external one : wealthy 
character, intelligence, — all the elements of social 
influence, — must not be disowned in behalf of re- 
ligious exclusion ; and once admitted as trusted 
functionaries of colonial governments, they surely 
are not to be held disqualified by creed from serving 
the imperial. The difficulties of Arnold's theory are 
great enough in England; when it is carried to the 
offsets from English power, it vanishes in impossL 
bilities. Yet, widely as methods of government 
must be diversified with the populations to which 
they are applied, a political philosophy ought surely 
to reach some fundamental principles which underlie 
13 



146 



MARTINEAITS MISCELLANIES. 



them all, and to enable the widest and most various 
empire to preserve a characteristic unity. 

We are unwilling to try our readers' patience by 
needlessly extending a discussion which, from the 
compressed form it unavoidably assumes, occasions, 
we fear, an unwelcome strain upon their attention. 
Yet we cannot close without indicating, in some im- 
perfect way, the course of reflection by which, as 
we conceive, these great questions of Polity may be 
brought to a successful issue. We are satisfied that 
no test can be applied to the several competing sys- 
tems of our day, — that no sound guidance can be 
obtained even through the confusion of the May- 
nooth debate, — without adverting to the first prin- 
ciples of political society. Almost all the ecclesias- 
tical schemes of our times seem to us well-reasoned 
from the premises they severally assume. The vol- 
untaryism of the Independents, the Catholicism of 
Mr. Ward, the Establishment scheme of Warbur- 
ton and Mr. Macaulay, the National endowment 
of Coleridge and Chalmers, are all admirably de- 
fended, and command the assent of those who can 
take their first step without hesitation. But here is 
the difficulty. To us they seem to set out with 
Scriptural interpretations, or Apostolic parallels, or 
historical predilections, or ethical maxims, or party 
phrases, or rules of expediency, of the most unreal 
and questionable kind ; to which, at all events, we 
find no correspondent conviction; and before and 
beyond which we must search for the point of di- 
vergence of these different systems. Our real clew 
must be found in the principles of human nature 



CHURCH AND STATE. 147 

that give rise to Church and State, — Religion and 
Government; — principles, of which all historical 
precedents, and even Christianity itself, as a received 
faith and source of social phenomena, are but the 
results ; and without reference to which only a blind 
and empirical use can be made of the lessons of the 
past. 

An origin has been sought for the social existence 
of man in the weakness of the isolated individual, 
and the necessity of union for purposes of self- 
defence. The manifest objections to this view, fa- 
miliar as they have been made by the reasonings of 
Aristotle and Cicero against it, have not prevented 
its frequent reappearance.* A general preference, 
however, has been given to the theory which refers 
the formation of communities to the affectionate 
propensities of our race ; and this account of the 
original social bond has received the sanction of 
Aristotle.f But it appears evident that the relation 
of mutual equality which would ensue from the 
mere sentiment of attachment ($i\ia), and which 
Aristotle himself points out as its consequence, is 
not that which binds together the most elementary 
human societies. A principle of subordination seems 
essential even to the very idea of a group brought 
into permanent unity. This principle is to be found, 
we believe, in the characteristics of man as a moral 
being, and would be wholly absent if he were made 



* See Say's Cours Complet d'Economie Politique, p. 544 ; and Sis- 
mondi's Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. I. p. 2. 
t Polit. III. i. 9. 



148 MARTINEAXj's MISCELLANIES. 

up of animal instincts, adaptive understanding, and 
sympathetic affections. These characteristics are 
two : a self-consciousness with respect to the various 
principles of action which impel him, attended by 
an intuitive perception of their relative worth ; and 
a causal power to act in accordance with this per- 
ception. The former is what is usually termed Con- 
science ; the latter, Will. These attributes constitut- 
ing the true human distinctions, he who manifests 
them in the highest degree is regarded as the most 
perfect man. Within the limits of our own con- 
sciousness, a higher principle of action cannot occur 
to us as practicable, while we are under solicitation 
from a lower, without our feeling its right over us ; 
nor can we imagine the effort made to serve its bid- 
ding, without a secret " Well done! " Let the same 
things be suggested to us, not in the comparative 
view of our own impulses, but in noticing the men 
around us, and the same sentiments will arise. A 
being manifestly under the influence of principles 
higher than our own awakens our reverence, and ob- 
tains a recognized title to guide us : a being with 
evident force of resolve to execute, more unfailingly 
than ourselves, what is simply on our level, excites 
our admiration, and wins authority over us. The one 
is the representative of Conscience, the other of Will : 
the one has the spiritual attribute of nobler quality ; 
the other, in greater quantity : the one attracts our 
aspiration, and is contemplated as something god- 
like ; the other inclines us to obedience, and is 
owned as something kingly : the one becomes the 
occasion of religion ; the other, of government. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 149 

If, then, there were no inequalities of character 
among our race, the sentiments of worship and of 
allegiance would remain undeveloped. But the co- 
existence in the same family of persons of different 
ages secures this felt inequality, and provides that 
every human being shall in turn live in the presence 
of those who are above him in both the attributes of 
manhood. The parent stands to the child in the 
place of God and King. It is this, indeed, which 
makes the proper family, in distinction from the litter 
and the brood. Were this all, however, the senti- 
ments in question would never pass the mere in- 
choate state, or effect any wider and more enduring 
combinations; all populations would be composed, 
not of communities, but, like the Greenlanders and 
others, of families living in sight of one another. 
But as the child becomes the adult, the moral ine- 
qualities which had been furnished by difference of 
age are replaced by those which the varieties of nat- 
ural genius and character supply. It is impossible 
for a number of human beings to be collected with- 
in reach of mutual influence without the appearance 
among them of some highest soul to be their Proph- 
et, and some bravest soul to be their King: and 
around such a one — in the former case, as a source 
of law for internal guidance, in the latter, of strength 
for external defence — will gather the first truly so- 
cial group. "Without such centre of attraction, it 
does not seem that any equal and collateral senti- 
ments, either of fear or friendship, which men might 
entertain inter se, could become sufficiently reflective 
or sufficiently extended to give rise to the primitive 
13* 



150 MARTINEAu's MISCELLANIES. 

forms of association. It is then the common looking 
up, not the mutual looking round, that effects this 
end : and society and reverence begin together. It 
is conceivable that, for a while, a human object 
alone might engage this feeling; but soon it must 
rise and determine itself towards invisible powers. 
For the strongest human wills have yet a stronger, 
and after every triumph, vanish as transient effects : 
and the highest consciences have yet a higher, that 
they only serve ; and while the noblest beings pass 
away, the binding law they lived to manifest con- 
tinues still the same. Thus that which they made 
men venerate becomes disengaged from their person- 
ality, and felt to be independent of the limitations of 
mortal existence : and the transcendent form of rever- 
ence arises which constitutes proper Religion. Now, 
for the first time, there is an invisible object of 
faith and homage distinct from the visible ; — the 
latter becomes simply representative of the former, 

— the embodiment of a sacred rule over human life; 

— not the divinity, but the shrine. The lawgiver 
and prophet, being now only the medium of faith, 
becomes the source of Church and State, as sep- 
arate from Religion. 

If such are the elementary forces from which a 
community would arise, one and the same germ 
contains the future growth of Church and State. 
There is nothing to prevent the Lawgiver, who de- 
fines and enforces recognized obligations, — and the 
Prophet, who awakens the sense of new ones, — 
from meeting in the same man : and until experi- 
ence has exercised its analytical industry on the 



CHURCH AND STATE. 151 

functions of human life, this will actually be the case. 
The two characters were united in Moses, in Pythag- 
oras, in Mahomet : and all societies which either 
are actually traceable to the spontaneous principles 
of combination in their simplest state, or have as- 
cended to these in theory, and been deliberately con- 
structed upon them, have possessed a theocratic 
character, and expressed the whole conscience of 
their members. Nay, in the conception which we 
naturally form of a perfect community, we unavoid- 
ably resume the same idea, and wholly sink the dis- 
tinction between civil and ecclesiastical rule. In the 
imagination of a Messianic kingdom which occupied 
the Hebrew mind, — in the expectation of a Mil- 
lennial reign, which engages the thoughts of many 
Christians, — in the faith which all disciples have of 
a society of the immortal good beyond the reach of 
death, — a perfect coalescence takes place between 
the ideas of Religion and Government, and the rule 
of a Divine Law over reverencing natures absorbs 
the functions of them both. If only one association 
existed in the world, so as to be wholly intent on its 
internal regulation, and if the two qualities of high- 
er conscience and of stronger will were always com- 
bined in its leaders, this union of the elements of 
Church and State would never be dissolved. But 
these are not the actual conditions under which we 
live. A community falls into foreign collisions and 
disputes ; military qualities — rarely found in the pro- 
phetic type of man, and implying a predominance of 
force of will over loftiness of conscience — become 
indispensable ; the hero most able to head the busi- 



152 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

ness of self-defence and aggression acquires a tempo- 
rary preeminence: and different functionaries now 
represent the moral law and the resolute strength of 
the society. The effects of this loss of isolation and 
assumption of external relations all tend to widen 
the separation of Church and State. Conquest is 
made ; new territory is taken, partitioned, and occu- 
pied : the direction of this work devolves on the vic- 
torious leader, apart from the earlier governors left 
at home. Hence he obtains kingly rights over the 
fresh acquisitions ; and to guard these rights, to 
modify, to interpret them, a special body of rules 
and officers becomes necessary, constituting a differ- 
ent system from that which before had managed all 
common affairs. Of this system, the title to per- 
sonal possession and the preservation of contracts of 
service and tenancy would manifestly form the chief 
objects, as between the members of the victorious 
people. Growing up by a recognized authority 
among themselves, it would still not lose the moral 
character hitherto felt to belong to all rule, and 
would be acknowledged as binding on them in a 
higher sense than that it was their interest to submit. 
In other words, the new code, though proceeding 
from their State-power, not from their Church-power, 
would still form part of their religion. With the 
subjugated tribe it is different. In relation to them, 
conquest gives rise to a system of coercive law, to 
which there is nothing answering in their conscience. 
It is invested with no sacred character, and is long 
obeyed under protest and with reluctance. Hence 
arises a great part of the penal legislation of a coun- 



CHURCH AND STATE. 153 

try : and, connecting this consideration with the pre- 
ceding, we see why the State officers — representa- 
tives of kingly rights — take cognizance of offences 
against public authority and private property; while 
the Church courts long retain the cases of primitive 
difficulty and injury between human beings, and set- 
tle the domestic questions of divorce, paternal right, 
and inheritance. 

Besides these general causes, involved in the as- 
sumption of external relations by a community, cer- 
tain special agencies connected with the historical 
development of Christian institutions have forced 
asunder the associate ideas of Church and State. 
During the first century of our era, the disciples 
not only held a new religion, but constituted a new 
polity. Their monotheistic earnestness was alone 
sufficient to prevent their having recourse to the le- 
gal system of franchises and protection afforded by 
a Pagan government, especially under a sway which 
no longer left to any of its subjects a history to boast 
or a country to serve. Add to this the expectation 
of a speedy return of Christ to reign over them, the 
feeling of allegiance to him, the sense of fellow-citi- 
zenship with each other, and total alienation from the 
world about to perish ; and it can no longer excite 
surprise that they organized a distinct republic, and 
secretly withdrew their civil as well as their religious 
life within the precincts of their own association. 
Meanwhile, the Empire continued, and its law nom- 
inally regulated the political affairs and the temple 
worship of all civilized lands. When Constantine, 
therefore, embraced the new faith, he was himself at 



154 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

the head of a Pagan system of Church and State ; 
he found coexisting a Christian system performing 
also the functions of Church and State ; with this he 
formed an alliance, dropping the Church element of 
the Pagan scheme, appropriating the State element 
of the Christian, but leaving without much interfer- 
ence its ecclesiastical offices. Thus two social mech- 
anisms, long independent, and even antagonistic, rec- 
ognized each other ; instead of either absorbing the 
other, they entered into compromise and partner- 
ship ; and the false distinction between secular and 
spiritual things became established. The subsequent 
dissolution of the Empire confirmed and widened 
this distinction. One temporal sword no longer held 
sway over the whole geographical extension of the 
faith : but while Christendom retained its unity, new 
centres of political government were everywhere 
forming themselves, and creating distinct social sys- 
tems ; the incipient promise of modern European na- 
tions. Provinces had long established their inde- 
pendent sovereignty, before the ecclesiastical power 
ceased to be Catholic ; and even the mere part- 
nership of Constantine's creation was destroyed by 
the vicissitudes which caused the dismemberment 
of the Empire to precede the disruption of the 
Church. 

It is evident also that the growth of sacerdotal 
doctrine could not but contribute to the same end. 
Not that this would deny to the Church any of the 
proper powers of the State. But not even the 
genius of a Gregory could reduce the world to an 
avowed theocracy. And, failing this, Priesthood takes 



CHURCH AND STATE. 155 

the other course, and denies to the State the powers 
of the Church ; claims supernatural offices which no 
human governor may touch, yet without which all 
other ordering of life is vain ; and thus goes apart 
from the system which it cannot appropriate and ab- 
sorb. The Catholic doctrine, it is true, maintains an 
accord, to some extent, between the civil and ecclesi- 
astical powers as to their ends ; both are to secure 
obedience to the moral law of God. But the one is 
an earthly, the other a divine instrument, for this end : 
and till the sceptre is content to do the bidding of 
the crosier, it is but the emblem of an agency unac- 
cepted and unblessed. 

But of all the causes tending to detach from each 
other the ideas of Church and State, none has had 
so powerful an operation as the Lutheran tenet of 
Justification by faith. It represents Christianity as 
entirely anulling all Law, and substituting a princi- 
ple at variance with any lingering consciousness of 
its dictates. It treats the whole system of feelings 
connected with the moral sense, — the scrupulous 
care, the self-denying resolve, the binding pressure of 
duty, the recoil from retributory justice, — as the 
characteristic marks of an unregenerate mind: and 
regards the extinction of all these in a sentiment of 
reliance on the sacrifice of Calvary, as a necessary 
act of Christian self-renunciation, fulfilling the one 
great end of Revelation. Now the State subsists 
wholly on the natural sense of obligation ; according 
to the Lutheran view, the Church subsists wholly to 
supplant it. The State proclaims the supremacy of 
Law; the Church, its abrogation. The State relies 



156 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

on the hopes and fears of responsible beings ; the 
Church triumphs in their annihilation. Thus the 
two institutions aim at ends directly contradictory: 
the conditions of mind which they severally seek to 
produce in a people cannot coexist ; and every indi- 
vidual successfully ruled by the one is detained or 
reclaimed from the other. The State, in short, be- 
longs wholly to the system of unconverted human 
nature and a perishing world : and is the positive 
opposite of the Church, which, by agencies beyond 
the compass of our will, gathers out of that world 
an emancipated community of saints. This doctrine 
is the true source of the modern notion of a " sep- 
aration of Church and State " : and in proportion to 
their earnestness in its adoption do English sects 
distinguish themselves in the agitation of which this 
phrase is the symbol. The strength of Voluntary- 
ism lies in the belief that the ends of Christianity 
are not moral ends. 

From this brief account of the disturbances which 
have interrupted the original partnership between the 
two elementary powers of society, some augury may 
be collected as to their possible re-approximation. 
We have found them drawn into contrast with each 
other by historical differences of origin in their pres- 
ent form; by doctrinal differences as to their ends; 
and practical differences as to their means. The ef- 
fects arising from the first of these may fairly be ex- 
pected to wear out. The accidental conditions under 
which Christian institutions on the one hand, and 
the political arrangements of modern Europe on the 
other, developed themselves into their present form, 



CHURCH AND STATE. 157 

offer now but the mere inert resistance of custom to 
the permanent force of natural human sentiment : and 
must insensibly yield up their influence to the new 
social tendencies in which that sentiment will ever re- 
assert itself. Then, the doctrinal schemes by which 
the ends of Church and State have been brought into 
contrariety, either as to their nature or as to their 
extent, are, in our estimation, false. Neither have 
the sacerdotal claims which would add a supernatu- 
ral function to the moral duties of the Church, any 
foundation in Christianity : nor is the Lutheran dis- 
regard of Law, which would withdraw from the 
Church the moral aims of the State, any thing but 
the exaggeration of a truth which leads to no such 
consequence. There remains, as the only real and 
essential distinction between the two institutions, a 
practical difference in their means. Coercion must 
be habitually employed by the civil society against 
the violator of its laws, irrespectively of the offend- 
er's own sense of justice ; by the religious society 
never. The only punishments it can invoke in this 
latter relation are such as may be in accordance 
with the pledged conscience of the transgressor, con- 
stituting an outward expression of his remorse, and 
partaking of the nature of penance : or else, they 
must amount to simple expulsion, — an act which 
may have no doubt a penal effect, but is intended as 
merely declaratory of a cessation of the bond of con- 
nection. The ground of this distinction is found in 
the very idea of the two associations. Both aim at 
the governance of life by moral law ; but with this dif- 
ference : the Church proceeds on the assurance that 
14 



158 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

all men are conscious of that law ; the State, on the 
observation that some men violate it. The Church 
assumes their anxiety to serve it ; the State, their re- 
luctance. The Church, looking round on the sphere 
of human temptation, speaks out in the vow, " We 
will not " ; the State, in the command, " Thou shalt 
not." The Church, therefore, from its very nature, 
relies upon the feeling of moral Reverence; the State, 
on the dread of Retribution. If all its proper pur- 
poses could be accomplished by the former, nothing 
would remain for the latter to achieve : but con- 
science failing to prevent evil in its spiritual begin- 
nings, fear must interpose to arrest its external devel- 
opment. The State is thus the dernier ressort to 
the Church, — society's forlorn hope for the check of 
moral ills. And hence it is, that it must never fail; 
or else, being an expression of the community's 
strength of Will, it loses its right, no less than its 
might : while the Church, representing the common 
aspiration towards a perfection that cannot cease to 
be owned as divine, remains unimpaired through all 
failures. 

It is obvious that the characteristic use of coercion 
by the State, though a peculiarity in the nature of 
its means j must introduce a limitation into the sys- 
tem of ends at which it aims. There is no human 
good, no element of social perfection, which it might 
not fitly attempt to realize, if there were reasonable 
hope of success. Bat wielding no instruments ex- 
cept the hope of public reward and the fear of pub- 
lic punishment, it is unable to reach the whole of 
life ; and large provinces of duty must remain beyond 



CHURCH AND STATE. 159 

its vigilance and control. "Without attempting to 
draw any exact boundary around its proper realm, — 
which indeed must vary with the historical conditions 
by which it is environed, — it is clear that it can 
take cognizance only of external actions, susceptible 
of attestation; that it cannot regulate acts of simple 
prudence and imprudence ; that, even of injuries, only 
those can be brought within its power which admit 
of definition, and of something like admeasurement, 
both as to their intent and as to their effects. Though, 
however, these limitations might be carried further, 
we altogether deny that they reduce the business of 
the State to the "protection of body and goods." 
We believe that a government which refuses to at- 
tempt more will soon be unable to accomplish this: 
and that when it seems to move with success within 
these narrow bounds, the order of which it boasts is 
bequeathed from an age when it aspired to a nobler 
power, and is sustained by sentiments lingering from 
that better time. The superannuated village school- 
master may retire into the dignity of village consta- 
ble ; and when he sees the decent habits, the quiet 
security, the neighborly respect, prevailing in the 
place, not a cabbage stolen from the gardens, not 
a bit of -washed linen threatened in the fields, the 
old man may indulge in complacent reflections on 
the potency of his office, and see in all this the 
terrors of his staff. He forgets that he taught the 
alphabet before he vindicated the law; that the 
men and women in the cottages were, a few years 
ago, the boys and girls on his old school-bench ; that 
the kindly thoughts around him were born in the 



160 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

play-ground or the cricket-green ; and that the rever- 
ent sense of Christian hope and duty, first awakened 
by his own serious voice, is the real guardian of 
the peace and order he admires. A State that, on 
the appointment of some philosophy more easy than 
wise, is in a condition to retire into official " protector 
of body and goods," must have had some more re- 
spectable occupation in its youth. 

On the whole, we should say, as the general result 
of the previous reflections, that the Church is that 
system of organized agencies by which men in so- 
ciety may be led towards compliance with the whole 
moral law, through reverence : and that the State is 
that system of organized agencies by which men in 
society may be led to comply with such parts of the 
moral law as are within the reach of public reward and 
punishment. Besides the Church proper, including 
the arrangements (1.) for worship, (2.) for education, 
there are a number of unorganized agencies of the 
same class : they comprise the whole set of influ- 
ences proceeding from higher minds upon lower, 
whether in domestic government, in the exercises of 
charity, in literature, or in social intercourse. And 
besides the State proper, including (1.) the legislative, 
(2.) the judicial, (3.) the executive systems, there are 
also a number of unorganized agencies of the same 
class : they comprise the whole set of prudential 
motives, whether from physical pleasure and pain, 
from public opinion, or from expectation of future 
reward and punishment. It is evident, that if the 
Church, in this largest sense, were perfect in its action, 
the State functions would never come into existence, 



CHURCH AND STATE. 161 

but always stand at zero : that if, on the other hand, 
the Church had no action, the State functions would 
become infinite, and cease to be possible : and that 
every success of the Church is a burden taken from 
the State. "What then is the conclusion to be drawn 
as to the mutual relation of the two institutions? 
Manifestly this : since a Society-in- State has no ends 
of self-government, which the same Society-in- Church 
does not aim to anticipate and realize in a better way, 
the former has the deepest interest in aiding the ex- 
periment of the latter. In principle, then, we see no 
ground for denouncing the interposition of civil sup- 
port on behalf of educational and religious institu- 
tions. If it be competent to the sovereign authority 
to spend the resources of the country in punishing 
wrong-doers, it seems perverse to say that the same 
authority may not engage itself in preventing their 
existence. Unfortunately, however, the abstract 
conclusion which we have stated lies at a vast dis- 
tance from the practical questions which create the 
ecclesiastical controversies of the present day, and af- 
fords but an incipient clew to guide us through their 
intricacies. The State authorities may have the right 
to aid the Church ; but suppose they cannot find it ; 
that the national sources of Reverence lie among the 
unorganized agencies, and have deserted the visible 
ecclesiastical system ; suppose that the citizens, un- 
conscious of the devout sentiments which unite them 
at heart, are so sensitive about the formal beliefs 
which separate them in understanding, that a com- 
mon recognition by the sovereign power threatens 
an implacable strife ; suppose it impossible to gain 
14* 



162 MARTINEAu's MISCELLANIES. 

assurance that the thing aided is a Church and a 
national Church, — that is, does really inspire rever- 
ence for the obligations of citizenship ; — what then is 
to be done? Can the right take effect? or, for want 
of the proper historical conditions, must it be inac- 
tive till better times? We shall not attempt to re- 
solve these questions now; anxious, in tracing our 
path through the theory of Polity, to admit no dis- 
turbance from the sceptic laugh, and fanatic fears, 
and party rage, that confuse every entrance on its 
practice. 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF 
RELIGION.* 

[From the Prospective Review for February, 1846.] 

It is a dishonorable characteristic of the present 
age, that on its most marked intellectual tendencies 
is impressed a character of Fear. "While its great 
practical agitations exhibit a progress towards some 
positive and attainable good, all its conspicuous 
movements of thought seem to be mere retreats 
from some apprehended evil. Its new sects are the 
results of certain prevalent antipathies, and are like 
herds flying from a common repulsion. The open 
plain of meditation, over which, in. simpler times, 
earnest men might range with devout and unmo- 
lested hope, bristles all over with directions, showing 
which way we are not to go. Turn where we may, 
we see warnings to beware of some sophist's pitfall, 
or Devil's ditch, or Fool's Paradise, or Atheist's des- 
ert, or inclosure of the elect, with its " procul este 
profani." A despair of truth seizes our timid and 
degenerate men. Checked and frightened at the 



* A Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion. By Theodore 
Parker, Minister of the Second Church in Roxbury, Mass. Boston. 
1842. 



164 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

entrance of every path on which they venture, they 
spend their strength in standing still; or devise in- 
genious proofs, that, in a world where periodicity is 
the only progress, retrogradation is the discreetest 
method of advance. The first Tractarians were 
evidently men not unused to explore the grounds 
and seek the limits of religious faith ; and having 
pushed forward over this vast field till it was track- 
less except by heretic feet, they were startled at their 
position ; hid their faces, and refused to look into 
the distance ; grew terrified at their own lengthening 
shadow, and felt as though at its further extremity 
it were already dipping into some dread abyss. The 
recoil of Coleridge, and more recently of the Cam- 
bridge men, from the philosophy of Locke, is no less 
clearly an act of repugnance ; a shrinking from con- 
sequences which it was not expedient to meet. And 
now a certain spectral monster, called " Transcen- 
dentalism," disturbs the serenity of conventional be- 
lievers, and produces an excitement greatly dispro- 
portioned to its alleged feeble and unsubstantial 
nature. Those who report upon it declare that they 
plainly discern it in many places, and can trace all 
its approaches ; they pronounce it, at the same time, 
the most bewildered of chimeras, — in fact, entirely 
destitute of eyesight: yet, wherever it gropes its 
way, it produces, like the hunter in blind-man's-buff, 
first an audible rustling in the childish crowd, and 
then a shooting off in all practicable radii. But it 
has always been the way with ghosts to do little, 
and to scare much. This intellectual cowardice — 
connected, like all cowardice, with an unloving and 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 165 

cruel temper — is a fatal indication of religious de- 
cline ; and a source of the imbecility of the pulpit, 
compared with the power of the secular press. Re- 
ligion no longer thinks, soliloquizes, and is overheard 
in worship ; but stands consciously in the presence 
of a host of enemies, and elaborates its defence and 
plans its attack. Theologies, philosophies, arise, 
not now as the simple tent which the soul would 
pitch, and where it would abide, and whence look 
forth, under the shelter of sufficient faith from the 
natural inclemencies of this universe ; but as shot- 
proof fortifications, built with engineering skill, to 
protect some threatened treasure, and defy some 
formidable artillery. Anxiety for a safe creed, and, 
from reaction, indifference to all creed, are the two 
bad sentiments with which priestly influence has 
impregnated the mind of Europe, in place of the 
natural desire for a true creed. The rarity with 
which doctrines connected with morals and divinity 
are looked at with a single eye to their truth or false- 
hood, is disheartening to those who know what this 
symptom implies. The fear of doubt is already a 
renunciation of faith. With all the talk of infidelity 
in this age, no one has more certainly a heart of un- 
belief than he who cannot simply trust himself to 
the realities of God ; who cannot say, " If here there 
be light, let us use it gladly ; if otherwise, let us go 
into the dark, where Heaven ordains : owning our 
helplessness, we shall feel the Invisible Presence near 
us keeping his holy watch ; but pretending that we 
see, we shall be left to a bleak and lonely night." 
To those who are haunted with fears lest " neo- 



166 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

logical " speculation should undermine the founda- 
tions of religion, it must be consolatory to remember, 
that though mankind, according to the testimony of 
divines, have always been on the point of renoun- 
cing their belief in God, they have never actually 
done so. On the appearance of every great class of 
discoveries in physical science, every large extension 
of ancient chronology, every new school of meta- 
physics, the danger has been announced as immi- 
nent : yet the Atheism of the world, like the Mil- 
lennium of the Church, is a catastrophe which con- 
tinues to be postponed. The researches which as- 
signed a high antiquity to the dynasties of Egypt 
and the mythologies of India, were charged with 
audacity for trespassing beyond the Flood, and even 
passing without notice by the gates of Eden ; as if, 
in fixing the place of Menes, and finding the origin 
of the Sagas, the Creator was superseded, and the 
world abandoned to fatalism. The great geological 
periods, descending by colossal steps down into the 
darkness of the past eternity, were thought to con- 
duct into the chambers of a godless necessity. The 
theory which admits, and the theory which denies, 
the « Necessary Connection " between Cause and 
Effect, have both been accused of hostility to the 
first principles of natural theology, and have both 
been employed to invalidate them. And the attempt 
to evade the danger by resolving all assignable 
powers into the activity of God, is condemned as 
mischievously Pantheistic, melting away every di- 
vine element from life in the solvent of indiscrimi- 
nate mysticism. Yet, after all these shocks, the 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 167 

theoretic faith of men stands fast, and the shelter of 
a divine rule is felt to overarch us still. Amid the 
vicissitudes of the intellect, worship retains its sta- 
bility : and the truth which, it would seem, cannot 
be proved, is unaffected by an infinite series of refu- 
tations. How evident that it has its ultimate seat, 
not in the mutable judgments of the understanding, 
but in the native sentiments of Conscience,, and the 
inexhaustible aspirations of Affection ! The supreme 
certainty must needs be too true to be proved : and 
the highest perfection can appear doubtful only to 
Sensualism and Sin. 

Gladly then do we gird up our hearts to follow 
the bold and noble steps of Theodore Parker over 
the ample province of thought which he traverses in 
his Discourse on Religion. However startling the 
positions to which he conducts us, and however 
breathless the impetuosity with which he hurries on, 
the region over which he flies is no dream-land, but 
a real one, which will be laid down truly or falsely 
in the minds of reflecting men ; his survey of it is 
grand and comprehensive, complete in its boundaries, 
if not always accurate in its contents ; and the glass 
of clear and reverential faith through which he looks 
at all things, presents the most familiar objects in 
aspects beautiful and new. The book treats in 
orderly succession of every topic interesting to the 
religious philosopher, and needful to be handled in 
the construction of a positive faith. It opens with 
a discussion of the Metaphysics of Religion, distrib- 
uted over two Books ; in the first of which the psy- 
chological sources of worship are investigated and 



168 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

traced through their manifestations in Fetichism, 
Polytheism, Monotheism ; while in the second, the 
passage is made to the Ontological conclusions 
which the religious sentiment demands, and, in de- 
termining the relations of God to Nature and to the 
Soul the questions of Miracle and Inspiration are 
reviewed. This leads to the Historical and Critical 
theology of the two succeeding Books ; the first 
treating of Jesus of Nazareth personally, the source 
of his authority, the essence of his religion, the 
attributes of his character ; the second, of the He- 
brew records by which his nation is known to us, 
and the Greek, in which the impression of himself 
and bis disciples is handed down ; the claims of 
their origin, the credibility of their contents, and the 
just limits to our veneration for their statements. A 
concluding Book examines the origin, organization, 
and distribution of the Church ; and estimates the 
merits and defects of its Romish, its Protestant, and 
its Philosophical parties. So vast a mass of matter, 
requiring for its management a very various skill, 
cannot, it may be supposed, be dealt with by one 
man, and in one volume, otherwise than superficially. 
Yet there is a mastery shown over every element of 
the great subject, and the slight treatment of it in 
parts no reader can help attributing to the plan of 
the work, rather than to the incapacity of the author. 
From the resources of a mind singularly exuberant 
by nature and laboriously enriched by culture, a sys- 
tem of results is here thrown up, and spread out in 
luminous exposition : and though the processes are 
often imperfectly indicated by which they have been 



reached, they so evidently come from the deep and 
vital action of an understanding qualified to mature 
them, that an opponent who might stigmatize the 
book as superficial, would never venture to call the 
author so. There are few men living, we suspect, 
who would like to have a controversy with him on 
any one of his many heresies. The references in 
his notes, though often only general, are, when need- 
ful, sufficiently specific and various to show an 
extent of reading truly astonishing in so young a 
writer : yet the glow and brilliancy of his page prove 
that the accumulated mass of other men's thought 
and learning has been but the fuel of his own genius. 
The copiousness of German erudition, systematized 
with a French precision, seems here to have been 
absorbed by a mind having the moral massiveness, 
the hidden tenderness, the strong enthusiasm, of an 
English nature. The least perfect of his achieve- 
ments appears to us to be the metaphysical : he is 
too ardent to preserve self-consistency throughout 
the parts of a large abstract scheme ; too impetuous 
for the fine analysis of intricate and evanescent 
phenomena. His philosophical training, however, 
gives him great advantages in his treatment of con- 
crete things and his views of human affairs : and in 
nothing would he, in our opinion, more certainly 
excel than in history, — whether the history of 
thought and knowledge, or of society and institu- 
tions. As to the form in which our author presents 
his ideas, our readers must judge of that from the 
passages we may have occasion to quote. We 
have small patience at any time with the criticisms 
15 



170 MARTINEAlj's MISCELLANIES. 

on style in which " Belles Lettres men " and rheto- 
ricians delight : and where we speak to one another 
of the solemn mysteries of life and duty and God, 
such things affect us like a posture-master's discus- 
sion of Christ's sitting attitude in the Sermon on 
the Mount, or some prudish milliner's critique on the 
penitent wiping his feet with her hair. Men who 
neither think nor feel, but only learn, pretend, and 
imitate, may make an art out of the deepest utter- 
ances of the human soul : but from these histrionic 
beings, who would applaud the " elocution " of 
Isaiah, and study the " delivery " of a " Father, for- 
give them ! " such a man as Theodore Parker recalls 
us with a joyful shame. " Thought," said Plato, "is 
the soul's hidden speech " ; with our author, and all 
such, we have the obverse of this, viz. Speech, 
which is the soul's open Thought. He reasons, he 
meditates, he loves, he scorns, he weeps, he worships, 
aloud. It may be thought very improper that a man 
should thus publish him self ] instead of some choice, 
decorous excerpts, " fit for the public eye." As, in 
prayer to God, it is deemed, in these days, no sin to 
utter, instead of our real desires, something else 
which we should hold it decent to desire; so, in 
addressing men, it is esteemed wise, not to say, or 
even to inquire, what we do think, but to put forth 
what it might be as well to think. "Weary of all 
this, and finding nothing but a holy dulness and 
sickly unreality in the conventional theology of the 
pulpit and the press, we delight in our author's irre- 
pressible unreserve. No doubt there are rash judg- 
ments ; there is extravagant expression ; the coloring 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 171 

of his emotions is sometimes too vivid ; the edge of 
his indignation too sharp. But he believes, and 
therefore does he speak. You have his mind. These 
things are true to him : and if not true in themselves, 
that is an objection to their substance, not to their 
style ; the excessive force of which, while it drives 
the truth the deeper, lays the error more open to 
reply. It has become the practice, in matters of 
theology, always to suppose that a writer acts upon 
the " doctrine of reserve," — which, by the way, Trac- 
tarian Jesuitry might have saved itself the trouble of 
recommending ; — it is thought impossible that a 
divine should say simply what he means, nothing 
more, nothing less. Especially if he recedes from 
the traditional standard of his class, he is supposed 
to have " gone away backward " immeasurably be- 
yond his apparent position. The heresies he pro- 
duces are concluded to be a mere sample of the 
store he carries in his satchel : and every doubt he 
avows becomes a multiplying factor, capable of in- 
definite involution, and sure to reappear in terrible 
dimensions from the imagination of some accuser. 
We propose it as a problem to the curious, " Why 
men, particularly preachers, are rarely supposed to 
believe more than they profess; continually, less; 
scarcely ever, precisely that, and nothing else ? " Is 
the instinctive shrewdness of the world mistaken in 
this impression ? Not in the least. Secular com- 
mon sense sees the matter as it is. And if the very 
existence of such a rule of interpretation does not 
show how habitual to the clerical character pretence 
or self-sophistication has become, we know not how 



172 MARTINEAu's MISCELLANIES. 

to explain it. Nay, so well understood is the shame- 
ful fact, that it is openly alleged as a reason for fur- 
ther unveracity. Experienced counsellors speak as 
if it were a regular law of the human mind to be- 
lieve, not just what is told it, but something differ- 
ent. They advise us to compute this deflection, and 
allow for it. To the young soul, burning with guile- 
less truth and love, they say, " Be cautious ; do not 
disturb men's minds by novelties ; let their harmless 
mistakes alone ; they cannot safely do without them. 
Besides, you will be sure to be misunderstood, and 
supposed to go further than you do. You will really 
leave ' the truest impression ' by a judicious silence, 
or a mere hint that these things are not to be put 
upon a level with i essentials.' " That is to say, if 
we would obtain credence, we must give forth, not 
truth, but a lie. Past falsehoods are made the plea 
for present ones ; and such as to-day is, will the mor- 
row also be ; and so on to the end of the chapter of 
hypocrisy; unless men arise who cannot hold the 
word that is in them, and will cast this diplomacy to 
the winds. And after all, it is only the false men 
that can long "misunderstand" the true; natural 
speech is not hard to the upright ; it can put no one 
out of his reckoning, but those who miss in it the 
" hints " they have been accustomed to calculate, 
and their favorite " silence which speaks for itself." 
Honor then to the manly simplicity of Theodore 
Parker. Perish who may among Scribes and Phari- 
sees, — " orthodox liars for God," — he at least " has 
delivered his soul." 

Of the noble spirit of truth that is in him, some 



173 

idea may be formed from the following sketch of the 
preaching of Jesus : — 

" Yet there were men who heard the new word. Truth 
never yet fell dead in the streets : it has such affinity with 
the soul of man, the seed, however broadcast, will catch 
somewhere, and produce its hundredfold. Some kept his 
sayings and pondered them in their heart. Others heard 
them gladly. Did priests and Levites stop their ears ? Pub- 
licans and harlots went into the kingdom of God before 
them. Those blessed women, whose hearts God has sown 
deepest with the orient pearl of faith ; they who ministered 
to him in his wants, washed his feet with tears of penitence, 
and wiped them with the hairs of their head, — was it in vain 
he spoke to them ? Alas for the anointed priest, the child 
of Levi, the son of Aaron, men who shut up inspiration in 
old books, and believed God was asleep. They stumbled 
in darkness, and fell into the ditch. But doubtless there 
was many a tear-stained face that brightened like fires new 
stirred as Truth spoke out of Jesus's lips. His word swayed 
the multitude as pendant vines swing in the summer wind ; 
as the spirit of God moved on the waters of chaos, and said, 
c Let there be light,' and there was light. No doubt many 
a rude fisherman of Gennesareth heard his words with a 
heart bounding and scarce able to keep in his bosom, went 
home a new man, with a legion of angels in his breast, and 
from that day lived a life divine and beautiful. No doubt, 
on the other hand, Rabbi Kozeb Ben Shatan, when he heard 
of this eloquent Nazarene, and his Sermon on the Mount, 
said to his disciples in private at Jerusalem, This new doc- 
trine will not injure us, prudent and educated men ; we 
know that men may worship as well out of the temple as in 
it ; a burnt-offering is nothing ; the ritual of no value ; the 
Sabbath like any other day ; the Law faulty in many things, 
15* 



174 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

offensive in some, and no more from God than other laws 
equally good. We know that the priesthood is a human 
affair, originated and managed like other human affairs. 
We may confess this to ourselves, but what is the use of 
telling it ? The people wish to be deceived ; let them. 
The Pharisee will conduct wisely like a Pharisee, — for he 
sees the eternal fitness of things, — even if these doctrines 
should be proclaimed. But this people, who know not the 
Law, what will become of them ? Simon Peter, James, and 
John, those poor, unlettered fishermen on the Lake of Gal- 
ilee, to whom we gave a farthing and the priestly blessing 
in our summer excursion, what will become of them when 
told that every word of the Law did not come straight out 
of the mouth of Jehovah, and the ritual is nothing ? They 
will go over to the Flesh and Devil, and be lost. It is true, 
that the Law and the Prophets are well summed up in one 
word, Love God and man. But never let us sanction the 
saying ; it would ruin the seed of Abraham, keep back the 
kingdom of God, and c destroy our usefulness.' Thus went 
it at Jerusalem. The new word was 6 Blasphemy,' the new 
prophet an c Infidel,' ' beside himself,' c had a devil.' But at 
Galilee, things took a shape somewhat different ; one which 
blind guides could not foresee. The common people, not 
knowing the Law, counted him a prophet come up from the 
dead, and heard him gladly. Yes, thousands of men, and 
women also, with hearts in their bosoms, gathered in the 
field and pressed about him in the city and the desert place, 
forgetful of hunger and thirst, and were fed to the full with 
his words, so deep a child could understand them ; James 
and John leave all to follow him who had the word of eter- 
nal life ; and when that young carpenter asks Peter, Whom 
sayest thou that I am ? it has been revealed to that poor, 
unlettered fisherman, not by flesh and blood, but by the 
word of the Lord, and he can say, Thou art the Christ, the 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 175 

Son of the living God. The Pharisee went his way, and 
preached a doctrine that he knew was false ; the fisherman 
also went his way ; but which to the Flesh and the Devil ? 

" We cannot tell, no man can tell, the feelings which the 
large, free doctrines of absolute Religion awakened when 
heard for the first time. There must have been many a Sim- 
eon waiting for the consolation ; many a Mary longing for the 
better part ; many a soul in cabins and cottages and stately 
dwellings, that caught glimpses of the same truth, as God's 
light shone through some crevice which Piety made in that 
wall Prejudice and Superstition had built up betwixt man 
and God ; men who scarce dared to trust that revelation, 
— 'too good to be true,' — such was their awe of Moses, 
their reverence for the priest. To them the word of Jesus 
must have sounded divine ; like the music of their home 
sung out in the sky, and heard in a distant land, beguiling 
toil of its weariness, pain of its sting, affliction of despair. 
There must have been men, sick of forms which had lost 
their meaning, pained with the open secret of sacerdotal 
hypocrisy, hungering and thirsting after the truth, yet 
whom Error and Prejudice and Priestcraft had blinded so 
that they dared not think as men, nor look on the sun-light 
God shed upon the mind." — B. III. Ch. VII. p. 305. 

To discuss worthily any one of the many great top- 
ics over which this volume carries us is impossible 
within the compass of a review. We shall endeav- 
or to go at once to the bottom of the matter, and 
fix our attention on the real point of divergence be- 
tween the author and his opponents. It is useless 
to dispute about the proof of the miracles, while we 
are at issue respecting their value, when proved ; to 
inquire into the inspiration of prophets and apostles, 
without first determining what " inspiration " means ; 



176 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

to talk about the evidences of " Revealed " Religion, 
till we have agreed upon the distinction between 
" Nature w and " Revelation " ; to balance the com- 
parative claims of the Bible on one hand, and 
" Reason and Conscience " on the other, till we are 
sure that a book and a mental faculty can become 
proper competitors, and find a common field of ri- 
valry. An inconsiderate reasoner is little aware 
how completely figurative are all theological formu- 
las, implying a whole system of conceptions which 
they do not name, and which may not be held in 
common by himself and his opponent. It is in the 
suppressed matter of every religious controversy that 
the real disagreement will be found : and until the 
moral and psychological assumptions are drawn out, 
which dictate the phraseology of belief, discussion 
must continue to be an aimless battle of words. 

The scheme of belief, which has given rise to 
Theodore Parker's reaction, may be summed up in 
these words : That Christianity is a divine message, 
imparted to teach us our duty, and to present the 
sanctions of a future life : and that this message is 
proved to be from God, by accompanying miracles, 
— the characteristic marks of his agency. "We are 
so accustomed to this kind of language, that the 
real contents of it escape our notice. Let us care- 
fully draw out the conceptions which it involves, 
with respect both to the divine nature and to the hu- 
man mind. 

As divine agency has an appropriate mark by 
which we may distinguish it, it is thus separated 
from other agencies, to which we should else refer 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 177 

the phenomena submitted to our examination. By 
the help of this mark we are enabled to say, " This 
is from Heaven." Take away this mark, and we 
can no longer say, "This is from Heaven." God, 
therefore, is one of a plurality of causes now opera- 
tive in the universe : and is discriminated, by a char- 
acteristic of his own, from other members of the 
general class of " powers." 

The characteristic in question by which his phe- 
nomena are recognized is their miraculous nature. 
Without pausing to make any exact analysis of this 
phrase, we may consider it as denoting departure 
from Law. This will be admitted to be no incor- 
rect statement of the feature we expect in any event 
claiming to be a miracle. In order, therefore, to res- 
cue a phenomenon from other Causes and refer it to 
God, it must be exceptional and out of course in re- 
lation to the general order of the known world. 

So long as this peculiarity cannot be shown to be- 
long to it, the other Causes retain their claim upon 
it, and the attempt to refer it to the divine agency is 
unsuccessful. That is to say, wherever Law is, God 
is not; and where God is, Law is not. The bounda- 
ry line thus drawn, — where does it pass ? what lies 
within it, — what beyond ? The realm of Law is 
coextensive with Nature, as an object of human 
study. Science is but our register of phenomenal 
laws ; and nothing which can ask for entry there can 
be anomalous. Science, however, is excluded from 
no department of the material or mental creation. 
From the bed of the ocean to the clusters of the 
milky way, it passes with its detective instruments 



178 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

of Number and of Measure, and never without the 
discovery, or at least the augury, of order. "When- 
ever it alights on a fresh region, the first confusion 
begins instantly to show signs of an incipient sym- 
metry, and the ranks of established law pass the 
confines which had arrested them, and spread their 
lines over the new realm. This, then, is a province 
actually conquered from God; as philosophy, with 
its " forces," advances, His power is dislodged in our 
belief, and retreats ; and every fresh occupation ef- 
fected by human knowledge is an expulsion execut- 
ed upon the divine energy. That this is the sen- 
timent really entertained by the upholders of the 
prevalent theology, is evident from the reluctance 
with which they admit any unexpected extension of 
the dominion of law. To find a rule of order, 
where they had fancied only insulated and anoma- 
lous volitions, seems to them like a loss of God, 
Who can doubt that this feeling is at the foundation 
of the hostility displayed against the " Vestiges of the 
Natural History of Creation " ? The author has no 
doubt committed errors in detail, and availed himself 
of questionable hypotheses, in order to connect the 
parts of his system, and complete his generalization. 
But the detection of these imperfections has been 
sought with an eagerness not to be misunderstood ; 
and has brought relief to the. awe-struck imagina- 
tion of many a reader, to whom the spreading tracks 
of law, as they pushed their prospective deeper and 
deeper into the wilderness of phenomena, seemed 
but a highway for the exile of his God. Science 
thus becomes burdened with a tremendous responsi- 



179 

bility : wherever it works, it is engaged in supersed- 
ing Deity: it drops, as a deadly nightshade, on a 
cluster of phenomena, benumbing all that was di- 
vine; and as the narcotic circle widens, the awful 
sleep extends. 

It would be unjust, however, to stop at this 
point in our development of the scheme in question. 
Nothing can be further from the minds of its advo- 
cates, than to snatch the whole domain of law from 
the Supreme Rule. They bring this also under the 
sway, not indeed of his present, but of his past voli- 
tion ; completing their system by the maxim, implied 
if not expressed, that where Law is, God was. Order, 
they affirm, requires a Mind to set it on foot, and 
carries with it the traces of antecedent Thought: 
no other causes are adequate for its explanation. 
The theory therefore sums itself up in this : that 
God, as an Agent, is excluded from the sphere of 
Order during its continuance, but is required for its 
commencement. " True," may the objector say, 
" if it ever commence at all. Putting myself back in 
imagination, as I doubt not you are doing, to a state 
of supposed chaos, and stripping the universe, as far 
as my conception can effect it, of all the forces which 
you admit to be operative now, I may grant that, 
out of this lawless confusion, law could not sponta- 
neously arise ; and that, if ever there were a time 
when Space was yet a seed-field of infinite, undeter- 
mined possibilities, nothing but a Mind could make 
election from such prior conditions, and elicit this 
definite creation and no other. But what reason 
have we for assuming the antecedence of any such 



180 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

state of things? Why am I to suppose a time 
when there were no dynamic elements? What 
trace has electricity or gravity of a modern origin, — 
of origin at all? If such power acts now, — acted 
yesterday, — and has left its traces on structures im- 
measurably old, — where is the date past which it is 
irrational to run back its agency ? Your proposi- 
tion therefore is true as an hypothesis ; but your hy- 
pothesis cannot be legitimated as a reality." 

That Order commencing requires a Mind to pro- 
duce it, may therefore be acknowledged by Atheist 
as well as Theist : that Order existing is beyond the 
reach of other and mere " natural " causes, must be 
denied by both. Indeed, the assertion is manifestly 
false, upon the principles of the scheme under re- 
view, and stands in direct contradiction to its as- 
sumption, that where Law is, God is not. What 
are those " other causes " which are incompetent to 
the case? Doubtless, such physical forces as we 
have before referred to, — electricity, gravity, &c. 
And to what are these powers adequate, if not to 
produce orderly phenomena? Name the sphere 
within which their explanation is valid, since it fails 
wherever uniformity is found. How do we know 
them as causes at all, except by the regularity of 
their effects, completing a determinate cycle of suc- 
cessions, and affording us fixed rules of expecta- 
tion ? What are all our books of Science but ex- 
positions of regular and beautiful phenomena, — 
nay, of all the regularity and beauty within the cir- 
cle of our knowledge, — distinctly referred to these 
very causes ? They account for order ; or they ac- 
count for nothing. 



THEODORE PARKERS DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 181 

Every thing, then, in this form of Theism, depends 
on our ability to find some proof of the recency or 
commencement of the existing " forces of nature." 
Can any one produce such proof? Dr. Crombie 
confesses the failure of every attempt at metaphysi- 
cal demonstration of this point : and resorts, as a 
last refuge, to certain physical and other indications 
impressed on the system of the world, at variance, 
as he thinks, with any great antiquity in the dy- 
namics of the universe.* Of what kind are these 
indications? Why, the supposed resistance of an 
ether or of the sun's light to the planetary revolu- 
tions, — showing that the solar system will have an 
end and must have had a beginning : and the recent 
origin of the human species. The known energies 
of nature being inadequate to account for the origi- 
nation of these structures, a divine source is indis- 
pensable. But what if, with our advancing knowl- 
edge, the " energies of nature " should be found not 
inadequate to the explanation, and the effects in 
question should enter the dominion of law ? Are 
we in that case to turn Atheists ? It would appear 
so, on this theory ; — a theory, in which God is in- 
voked only as a supplementary Cause, to eke out the 
imperfections of other powers, for ever spreading 
their acknowledged achievements to the prejudice 
and peril of his sovereignty ; and all is staked on our 
not finding a solution for this or that scientific per- 
plexity. Religion poises itself on a trembling apex, 
if this be really the footing on which it stands, f 

* Natural Theology, Vol. I. Ch. I. §§ 10, 11. 

t M. Comte, in his remarkable work, " Cours de Philosophie Posi- 

16 



182 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

The truth is, the Theist who takes this ground has 
made a concession false in itself, and fatal to his ar- 
gument. Yielding to the tendency, invariably cre- 
ated by inductive science, to confound together the 
notions of Law and Cause, he has admitted physical 
agencies to be real powers : and has thus put instru- 
ments into the hands of Atheism, with which he 
will in vain struggle to contend : his utmost skill can 
give him only a drawn battle. Once allow that 
Causes are of two sorts, living Will and dead 
Forces, and the competition between them for the 
governance of the universe can never be determined. 
How alone can we proceed to make choice between 
two causes, both claiming the parentage of a given 
system of effects ? Assuredly, by seeking through- 
out these effects for some feature exclusively belong- 
ing to one or the other of the causes in question. 
And where we have to account for a limited series 
of phenomena, we may hope to detect such signa- 
ture of their origin ; they will display some peculi- 
arity in which they differ from other assortments of 
phenomena, and will so teach us something of the 
nature of their cause. But where the facts are ab- 
solutely infinite in number, and comprise all things, 
this method can lead to no result : because the phe- 

tive," assumes this to be the real state of the relation between Science 
and Religion : and accordingly decides that there is " an inevitable an- 
tipathy between research into the real laws of phenomena and the in- 
quiry respecting their essential causes " : he treats as chimerical all at- 
tempts to remove the "radical incompatibility" between Theology and 
Positive Philosophy : and, relying on the irresistible scientific tendency 
of the modern European mind, entertains confident hopes of getting 
rid of the u Hypothesis of a God" ! Tome IV. 51 e Le<;on. 



THEODORE PARKER S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 183 

nomena observed, not being this set, or that set, but 
all sets, — the sum total of what exists and what 
happens in the universe, — can have no characteris- 
tic, — no common property which other things have 
not ; for those " other things " are in your list as well 
as these ; and it is only by characteristics in the ef- 
fect, that you can infer the nature of the Cause. A 
theology, therefore, which relinquishes the unity of 
causation, and permits Science to dismember the 
idea and create a whole class of powers, performs 
an act of suicide. By equating the distinction be- 
tween divine and non-divine with the difference be- 
tween natural and non-natural, it surrenders, in our 
opinion, the very citadel of faith : turns the universe 
from a monotheistic temple into a Pantheon of phi- 
losophy, and whips out the worshipper to make way 
for the experimentalist. 

The same system makes assumptions respecting 
man, to which it is quite as difficult to give assent, 
as to its representation of God. Revelation, we are 
assured, is to be conceived of as a message, proved 
by attendant miracles to be from Heaven, and de- 
signed to teach us our duty and present the sanctions 
of a future life. Our duty, then, is authenticated by 
the message ; and the message by the Divine mark. 
What is this but to say, that from God as known we 
learn duty as not known ? Nay, it is worse ; for 
there is no other knowledge, of God here supposed 
than a recognition of his power; and what is really 
implied is this, — that our Senses may know his 
physical mark, when our Conscience cannot tell his 
moral mark. The moral faculty is the dunce, whose 



184 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

dulness the senses, with their hornbook, undertake 
to instruct in the laws of right and wrong. When 
the lesson is learned by rote, it is enforced by the an- 
nouncement of future retribution ; and when carried 
into practice under this influence, the specific pur- 
pose of the Revelation, as above defined, is perfect- 
ly fulfilled. Yet it is plain that from a nature, as- 
sumed to be insensible to the intrinsic obligation of 
what is taught, nothing but external conduct, imita- 
tive of genuine and affectionate duty, can be ob- 
tained by this preceptive appeal to self-interest. And 
it would seem to follow, that Revelation accom- 
plishes its characteristic end, when it has brought 
us to act, from prudential hope and fear, as though 
we loved our neighbor and our God. We are well 
aware that the supporters of this scheme do not 
practically attribute to human nature the moral 
stolidity which their theory suggests ; they allow a 
considerable, but imperfect, perception of right and 
wrong. This, however, relieves no difficulty, and is 
an ineffectual compromise. The duties taught by 
the Revelation either accord with the moral percep- 
tion addressed, or do not accord with it. If they do, 
then nothing beyond the natural law is given us. If 
they do not, then a collision arises between the re- 
quirements of miracle and the dictates of nature; 
and as the physical sign of God is assumed by the 
theory to be better known by us than his moral trace, 
and for this very reason adopted as the instrument 
of instruction, we ought at once to renounce the 
suggestions of Conscience, and do any wicked- 
ness which " the wonderful work " may recommend. 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 185 

Whoever shrinks from this conclusion acknowledges 
that miracle cannot override Reason and Conscience ; 
that these powers have a veto on all professing en- 
actments of almighty law ; and supply a paramount 
natural inspiration diviner than any that is super- 
natural. 

We are convinced that, notwithstanding all that is 
said in praise of the "miraculous evidence," it is 
gradually loosening its hold on the minds even of its 
defenders. The indications of this are not to be 
mistaken. Attention is more and more drawn in 
and concentrated upon the great strong-hold, which 
we believe to be impregnable, — the resurrection of 
Christ, — an event whose testimonial character is, to 
say the least, very subordinate to its higher rela- 
tions. The other miracles, so far from being deemed 
available as media of proof, are usually treated as 
the great objects of proof. They were once the affi- 
davit; they are now the brief. And only those of 
them are heartily referred to, in which the credential 
element is lost and absorbed in their character of 
majesty or mercy, which enables the moral affections 
to quiet the cross-questionings of the understanding. 
Miracles in which the pure evidential ingredient is 
found unmixed, lie in the most unaccountable dis- 
use, and appear even to excite an uncomfortable 
feeling. That Jesus paid a tax by having a fish 
caught with a shekel in his mouth, is not adduced to 
convince the doubting, of his divine authority : nor 
do we hear Paul's mission argued from the miracles 
wrought by his apron. Why not? These are gen- 
uine " signs" empty of all value except their signifi- 
16* 



186 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

cance as evidence: this however remains quite per- 
fect in them ; for they are surely as good proofs of 
superhuman power as any other miracles. They 
rest on the same testimony as the events most firmly 
believed. Yet is there any one who does not feel, 
that the testimony will scarcely bear the strain of 
these events ? And who then will deny, that it is 
the moral element of Christian history that must 
authenticate the miraculous, not the miraculous that 
authenticates the moral ? 

The whole language of this scheme involves con- 
ceptions unworthy of the present capabilities, often 
below the present state, of religion among thoughtful 
and devout men. For the first disciples, themselves 
on earth, and constantly looking for Christ's return 
hither, it was only natural to imagine two spheres of 
being, with the wilderness of clouds and space be- 
tween; the one, the scene of God's local presence, 
where Jesus " sat at the right hand of God " : the 
other, this world of waiting and of exile, which had 
nothing divine but as an express emanation from 
that upper sphere. Filled with the fancy of a phys- 
ical distance between heavenly and human things, 
they fitly spoke of Messengers and Ambassadors of 
God, as we should of visitants from a foreign poten- 
tate. To treat the miracles as Credentials was a 
suitable thing, when such acts, though out of nature 
upon this lower earth and among ordinary men, 
were regarded as the established ways of the upper 
world to which Messiah belonged, and accepted as 
the overflow of his diviner nature upon his mortal 
career. And there was something in the way of 



THEODORE PARKER ? S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 187 

positive information, startling enough to be described 
as a Message from God, to those who thought them- 
selves apprised of the speedy Advent and approach- 
ing end of the world. This was to them a notice of 
an historic event, which would affect their whole 
course of action in the mean while. But all this is 
incapable of harmonizing with our altered state. 
Our outward universe, our personal expectations, are 
totally different from theirs. Their one world, store- 
house of heavenly things, has burst into ten thou- 
sand spheres, not one of which is nearer to the awful 
presence than our own. We are not remote from 
our Father, that he should have to send to us ; there 
is no interval between. Nor are the universal prin- 
ciples of Faith and Duty, which constitute the es- 
sence of Christianity, so strange to our nature, that 
we should treat them as a communication from for- 
eign parts. There is no going and coming, no tele- 
graph, or embassage, no interposition and retreat, no 
divine sleeping and waking, in pure religion. The 
human race is for ever at home with God ; and his 
Inspiration, intensest in the soul of the Galilean, is 
fresh and open for every age. 

The recoil of Theodore Parker from the received 
system is vehement, and, we certainly think, exces- 
sive. But there is great difficulty in giving an ac- 
count of his scheme as a whole : for he is not an 
exact writer, scarcely a consistent thinker ; and his 
convictions are rather a series of noble fragments, 
waiting adjustment by maturer toil, than a compact 
and finished structure. His vast reading, and his 
quick sympathy with what is great and generous of 



188 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

every kind, have given an eclectic character to his 
philosophy. His mind refuses to let go any thing 
that is true and excellent; yet in adopting it takes 
insufficient pains to weave it into the fabric of his 
previous thought; so that the texture of his faith 
presents a pattern not easy to reduce to symmetry. 
At one time he hates evil, like a Dualist ; at another, 
pities it, like a Fatalist ; now, melts away the hu- 
man soul and becomes lost in the Universal Being, 
like a mystic; and then, brings out the individual 
free-will again with force and prominence worthy of 
a Stoic. Zeno and Spinoza seem to us to coexist 
in his mind ; but they have not struck up a mutual 
acquaintance. 

Our author argues from the religiosity of man to 
the reality of God ; and concurs with Schleiermacher 
in regarding the Sense of Dependence as the source 
of human faith. The Sentiment of religion, like any 
other primitive want of our nature, doubtless directs 
itself to an object, not illusory, but actual; and that 
we " feel after " a perfect Being is enough to prove 
that he exists, and that we can " find Him." Thus 
is legitimated the " intuitive Idea of God," which is 
said to be the idea of " a Being infinite in Power, 
Wisdom, and Goodness." Of this " Idea " many 
things are affirmed, to which, we must confess, we 
can attribute no defensible meaning. It is said to 
be the " logical condition of all other ideas " (p. 21) ; 
and yet to be " afterwards fundamentally and log- 
ically established by the a priori argument" (p. 23). 
What media of proof can " establish " that which 
is the logical condition of those very media ? It is 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 189 

also said to be primitive and simple, like the idea of 
" existence " (p. 22) : and it puzzles us to think how 
that which is perfectly unique and simple, and des- 
titute of characteristics, can be " logically estab- 
lished." And the account which our author gives 
of this Idea does " not" he assures us, " define the 
nature of God, but does distinguish our idea of him 
from all other ideas and conceptions whatever." 
This appears to us simply self-contradictory: and 
we cannot deny that there are many other things of 
the same sort. We could easily dismiss blemishes 
of this kind, arising from insufficient precision, if the 
looseness did not accumulate and condense itself 
into a doctrinal conception very seductive, but, in 
our opinion, very erroneous. The oscillation back 
from the atheistical tendencies of a cold and me- 
chanical philosophy has generally flung the reasoner 
into Pantheism : and our author has not, in our 
opinion, escaped the danger, — if, at least, we must 
judge by the words of his theory, rather than by the 
spirit of his mind. Offended at the usurpation ef- 
fected by " natural powers," he has swept them all 
away, and drowned them in the ocean of the One 
Supreme. Shocked at the banishment of God as a 
living Agent from the actual scenes and recent ages 
of this world, he has revoked the Almighty Presence 
with such power as to make an absence of all else ; 
and when we look round for the objects that should 
be His correlatives, the beings that should receive 
His regards, the theatre that was waiting for His 
energy, they are gone. Perhaps we shall be asked, 
" What then ? Can there be in human faith an excess 



190 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

of Deity ? Is there any thing you would care to save 
from the general merging of all inferior causes ? " 
Yes ; we reply, there is one thing that must not be 
overwhelmed, even by an invasion of the Infinite 
Glory. Let all besides perish, if you will ; but when 
you open the windows of heaven upon this godless 
earth, and bring back the sacred flood to swallow up 
each brute rebellious power, let there be an ark of 
safety built (it is Heaven's own warning word) to 
preserve the Human Will from annihilation : for if 
this sink too, the divine irruption designed to purify 
does but turn creation into a vast Dead Sea occu- 
pied by God. Theodore Parker has failed to per- 
ceive this. The more effectually to contradict the 
system which makes the Creative Power only One 
Cause among many, he has represented it as the 
Solitary Cause. Our author seems aware that he 
is open to this criticism : and as we should be sor- 
ry to be confounded with the alarmists who have 
raised the cry against him in his own land, we will 
state more precisely the ground of our objection to 
his theory. He observes : — 

" The charge of Pantheism is very vague, and is usually 
urged by such as know least of its meaning. He who con- 
ceives of God, as the immanent cause of all things, as in- 
finitely present, and infinitely active, with no limitations, 
is sure to be called a Pantheist in these days, as he would 
have passed for an Atheist two centuries ago. Some who 
have been called by this easy and obnoxious name, both in 
ancient and in modern times, have been philosophical de- 
fenders of the doctrine of one God, but have given him the 
historical form neither of Brahma nor Jehovah." — B. I. 
Ch. V. § 2, p. 94. 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 191 

Now, if one who denied the Divine absenteeism 
from creation and life, as they now are, or, what is 
equivalent, the Divine inertness within them, were 
justly called a Pantheist, we should glory in the 
name. We do not believe in epochs of Creative ac- 
tivity, exceptional to the general constancy of a god- 
less repose. With the prophet of old, we should be 
ashamed to think of the everlasting Hope of men, 
" as a Stranger in the land, and as a Wayfarer that 
turneth aside to tarry for a night."* His work is 
bounded by no chronological conditions, and is nei- 
ther old nor new. His dial indicates always the 
same hour of eternity : its infinite shadow never 
moves ; flung across the universe, it eclipses no liv- 
ing world, but darkens only death and the abyss. 
His agency is no intermittent tide, carrying a shift- 
ing wave of glory from sphere to sphere, from cen- 
tury to century, and leaving a dreary strand of de- 
sertion between, strewed only with the wrecks of the 
receding God. The legendary Creation-week, the 
consecrated date of our childish thought, has long 
since burst open, as the capsule of illimitable ages, 
through all of which the Productive Will has been 
as fresh and fertile as at the moment when " light 
was." We protest against the ascription of causality 
to the " laws of nature " which Science investigates. 
The methods of Science can teach us nothing but 
the order of phenomenal succession to which our 
expectations are to adjust themselves ; and this, in 
spite of all the special pleading of " acute analysis," 

* Jer. xiv. 8. 



192 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

does not fulfil our idea of Causation. The mind de- 
mands a Power beneath the surface over which sense 
and observation range, to evolve this serial order, to 
marshal the punctual ranks of beneficent and beauti- 
ful events, to measure the invariable cycles, and beat 
time to the listening seasons. We think that that 
Power cannot in reason be otherwise conceived than 
as the Living Will of God. So far, therefore, as out- 
ward nature is concerned, we are far from objecting 
to sink all its so-called " forces," and to regard them 
as so many manners of divine agency. " This view 
seems " to us, not only " at first," (as our author 
says,) but to the end, 

"... congenial to a poetic and religious mind. If the 
world be regarded as a collection of powers, — the awful 
force of the storm, of the thunder, of the earthquake ; the 
huge magnificence of the ocean, in its slumber or its wrath ; 
the sublimity of the ever-during hills ; the rocks, which re- 
sist all but the unseen hand of time ; these might lead to 
the thought that they were God. If men looked at the 
order, fitness, beauty, love, everywhere apparent in na- 
ture, the impression is confirmed. The All of things ap- 
pears so beautiful to the comprehensive eye, that we almost 
think it is its own Cause and Creator. The animals find 
their support and their pleasure ; the painted leopard and 
the snowy swan, each living by its own law ; the bird of 
passage that pursues, from zone to zone, its unmarked path ; 
the summer warbler which sings out its melodious exist- 
ence in the woodbine ; the flowers that come unasked, 
charming the youthful year ; the golden fruit maturing in 
its wilderness of green ; the dew and the rainbow ; the 
frost-flake and the mountain snow ; the glories that wait 
upon the morning, or sing the sun to his ambrosial rest; 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 193 

the pomp of the sun at noon, amid the clouds of a June 
day ; the awful pomp of night, when all the stars with a 
serene step come out, and tread their round, and seem to 
watch in blest tranquillity about the slumbering world ; the 
moon waning and waxing, walking in beauty through the 
night ; — daily the water is rough with the winds ; they come 
or abide at no man's bidding, and roll the yellow corn, or 
wake religious music at nightfall in the pines : these things 
are all so fair, so wondrous, so wrapt in mystery, it is no 
marvel that men say, this is divine. Yes, the All is God. 
He is the light of the morning, the beauty of the noon, and 
the strength of the sun. The little grass grows by his 
presence. He preserveth the cedars. The stars are se- 
rene because he is in them. The lilies are redolent of God. 
He is the One ; the All." — B. I. Ch. V. § 2, p. 89. 

Our author professes to discard the view which 
he has thus unfolded with so much beauty. Yet 
he appears to us to adopt it entire, and to com- 
plete it by applying the very same mode of thought 
to the mental world, which is here restricted to the 
material. He is like many a deep thinker, who, 
when sent by Spinoza into his field of speculation, 
might say, " I go not " ; but afterwards went We 
wish he had definitely stated the reasons for either 
his supposed repudiation, or his apparent adoption, 
of the doctrine. In the absence of such guidance 
from him, we must explain, that the very ground of 
our own assent to the physical half of the theory, 
as just presented, is also the ground of our dis- 
sent from the other half. With our obstinate no- 
tions, the reasons for advancing thus far absolutely 
forbid us to move a step further : but, with more 
17 



194 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

open temper, our generous friend, if Philosophy com- 
pel him to go one mile, will go with her (or, may- 
be, without her) twain. In the present instance, 
what is it which induces us to put denial on the 
whole system of scientific " forces " ; to insist that 
God — Spirit though he is — is not hindered, by any 
veil of " nature," from himself putting the beauty 
and the wonder into the smallest of his works ; and 
to proclaim all the laws of the unreflecting universe 
the action of his Mind ? It is simply this, — the 
conviction that there is, and, for us, can be, no other 
Causation than the intelligent and voluntary ; that 
no second sort of originating energy is at all conceiv- 
able ; and that, in the last analysis, such phrases as 
" inanimate power " involve a contradiction. We 
are persuaded that no observation of consecutive 
phenomena could ever give us the notion of power ; 
that the conscious rising of effort against resistance 
is the real source of the idea ; and that Cause and 
Will mean at bottom the same thing. The experi- 
ence of Causation in ourselves is the birthplace of 
all our knowledge and thought upon this matter ; 
our whole language on the subject has no meaning 
whatever, except as it keeps close to this experience ; 
for nothing new is afterwards added to it, though the 
benumbing influence of time may take something 
from it. When the wondering child asks what it is, 
or, as he will always say, who it is, that bends the 
rainbow, or hangs up the moon, he dreams of noth- 
ing else than of some living hand directed by intend- 
ing thought. That is an originating cause well 
known to him : there is no other possible to his 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 195 

conception then; no one can pretend that his sub- 
sequent experience gives him any closer insight into 
the nature of power : and we believe, therefore, that 
he will never be nearer the truth than when, under 
the intuitive feeling, common to him and Herschel 
and Archimedes, that ' every phenomenon must 
have a cause,' he attributes what he sees to an un- 
seen and acting mind. No later discoveries, we do 
submit, can show the faintest right to correct this 
earliest impression. They only stupefy the first star- 
tled sentiment, and turn aside the questionings of 
reverent curiosity to make room for the researches 
of practical utility. For the satisfaction of faith we 
want to conceive of the Cause, for the service of 
life we want to find the order, of the events around 
us. The latter inquiry, in which we make continual 
progress, encroaches on the former, which remains to 
the manhood of our race the same mystery that 
brooded around its infancy. And while Custom 
gradually lays devout wonder into sleep, Science 
unhappily pilfers its language lying unguarded by 
its side ; antecedents are labelled Causes, and laws 
become powers ; the knowledge of nature gets sur- 
reptitiously baptized into the waters of faith, and 
goes through the world with a Christian name, but 
with a Pagan spirit. When thus arrogating the 
place of Religion, Science, with its stock of " forces " 
behind every cluster of phenomena, is but the athe- 
istic Fetichism of our days ; and there is at heart no 
meaner superstition than its dynamic worship. The 
Indian makes gestures in his wigwam before his 
" medicine-bag," praying to the Spirits of power that 



196 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

rule his world : and the philosopher, — down he 
goes prostrate in the musings of his library, before 
his electricity and his nebular hypotheses, and his 
corpuscular attractions, — putting his trust in powers 
of Matter that govern the universe. Fetichism was 
not wrong in setting a background of living Will 
behind the objects and appearances of nature ; but 
in the multitude and isolation of its unseen Agents. 
The Idolatry of Science has retained the multitude, 
and taken away the living Will. The simplicity of 
Monotheism cancels the pretended host, and takes 
the collective universe as the symbol of the Omni- 
present and the Omni-active Mind. 

Now if it is the consciousness of Will in ourselves 
that sets us on search for a Will that rules the world, 
we must attribute to Him whom our faith may find 
the very kind of power which belongs to us ; and 
we must retain in us the power we ascribe to Him. 
But this is what Pantheism declines to do. As soon 
as it has found its Source of the world, it abdicates 
the very faculties that impelled it on its holy pilgrim- 
age. It recognizes in Him, not only the pervading 
Life of nature, but the Autocrat, or rather the very 
Essence, of the Soul. The believer insists on self- 
annihilation ; says he has no power of his own ; is 
as water under the finger of God ; is cause of noth- 
ing ; scarcely even an effect ; only a phenomenon ; 
a flake of snow falling on the mighty river. And so 
he dissolves himself away. Now, if this be true, and 
he could only have perceived it at first, then, having 
no causation within him, he would have sought and 
discovered none without him ; and to him there 



197 

would have been no God. By knowing the truth, 
he would have been plunged into the most tremen- 
dous of falsehoods ; and it is only by assuming a 
falsehood that he can reach the sublimest of truths ! 
Religious faith can never be of this parricidal nature, 
devouring its own premises. 

And it is curious to observe the action and re- 
action of this mode of thought, in its alternate in- 
fluence on life and on religion. When the theorist 
has got rid of his Free-will and entire individuality 
in his sense of Deity, he has stopped, as far as prac- 
ticable, and sealed up the proper sources of his feel- 
ing of causalty ; he seeks to be disposed of with a 
serene fitness to the Divine Thought : his active 
energies decline ; his only aim is to suffer without a 
murmur in evidence of utter self-renunciation : he 
dreams and mortifies his life away. Human nature, 
attenuated to this state, is no longer qualified to fur- 
nish, from its self-consciousness, the true and noble 
type of God : voluntary purpose, with the mental 
and moral attributes associated with it, is less and 
less attributed to him : the sickliness, which descend- 
ed at first from the too overshadowing thought of 
Him, returns upwards and infects the conception of 
his Infinite nature ; till He is dishonored into Na- 
ture's animal life or transmigrating principle ; the 
spiritual mysticism completes its metaphysic revo- 
lution ; and having lifted itself into too thin an air 
of contemplation, plunges down and dies in the mire 
of a gross idolatry. 

For these reasons among others, we esteem it of 
the highest moment to protect from embarrassment 
17* 



198 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

the consciousness in man that he is a Cause in 
himself; and to prevent the slightest loosening of 
the idea of Will from the conception of God. And 
as the Will is that in which Personality resides, this 
is the same thing as to say, that we must hold fast 
to the faith of a Personal God. We strongly object 
to much of Theodore Parker's language on this sub- 
ject. If, indeed, he uniformly adhered to the defini- 
tion already given, " a Being infinite in Power, 
Wisdom, and Goodness," all would be well ; for it 
is to save these very attributes from being frittered 
away, that we insist so strenuously on retaining the 
analogy between man and God in the quality of 
Will. Without this, as we have shown, there is no 
" Power " ; without this, — the faculty which directs 
itself to preconceived ends, — how can there be 
"Wisdom"? without this, by which selection is 
made among undetermined possibilities, how can 
those exclusions take place which leave the ways of 
Heaven " good," and good alone ? And if Will be 
indispensable, we know not how it is possible to 
satisfy our author's yearning after a God wholly 
" Absolute " and " without limitations." Is it possi- 
ble to conceive of Will, and the moral attributes in- 
volving it, entirely insulated, and acting without any 
extrinsic conditions ? Can there be qucesita without 
any data ? We do confess that our notions of either 
Mind or Character lose their ground and vanish in 
this attempt to destroy all the Divine relations. A 
Deity, to be thought of first as a lonely Unity, then 
self-evolved into a creation, whose material forms 
are the development of his extension, whose minds 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 199 

of his consciousness, appears to us to be fatally re- 
mote from any possible trust, and love, and aspira- 
tion in our hearts. We lament, therefore, that our 
author should have committed himself to such posi- 
tions as these : that God is " not Personal nor Im- 
personal " (p. 160) ; that " our human personality 
gives a false modification to all our conceptions of 
the infinite " (p. 27) ; that He is " the reality of all 
appearance " (p. 164) ; " the Absolute ground " of 
" nature " and " the soul " (p. 21) ; " the substantiali- 
ty of matter " (p. 170) ; " the spirituality of spirit " 
(p. 182). If God be thus both the essence and the 
phenomena of matter on the one hand, and of mind 
on the other, his Being coincides with the whole of 
the two hemispheres which compose our universe: 
nothing is left over to be matter, or to be mind : He 
and the " All of things " are identified ; and scarcely 
even does the distinction remain between the " natu- 
ra naturans " and the " natura naturataP The re- 
lation of Cause and Effect is exchanged, in the phra- 
seology we have quoted, for that of Substance and 
Quality ; and whenever this is resorted to in order to 
represent the connection between God and the world, 
we are on the traces of a Pantheism far from harm- 
less. 

On the whole, the fundamental formulas of the 
several theories may perhaps be justly presented 
thus. The prevalent system says: Phenomena re- 
quire a Cause ; Where Law is not, the Cause is 
God; Where Law is, God is not, but was the 
Cause. Pantheism says : Transient phenomena re- 
quire an Absolute ground, as quality is the predicate 



200 



MARTINEAITS MISCELLANIES. 



of substance ; that Absolute ground is God. The 
scheme which appears to us most true says : Where 
phenomena are, a Cause is ; Cause implies Will ; 
and (within the sphere of our observation) all be- 
yond the range of Human Will is Divine Will. Ac- 
cording to the first view, God is, to us, one Cause 
among many ; according to the second, He is one 
and All ; according to the third, He is one of Two. 

And now that we have discharged our conscience 
in this matter, let us say that our protest against 
Theodore Parker's statements is occasioned more by 
the probable tendencies of thought in his readers' 
minds, than by what we suppose to be his own. 
We do not believe that he is at all deeply tinctured 
with Pantheism. Expressions drop from him con- 
tinually which are wholly incompatible with the 
doctrines we have condemned. He speaks, for in- 
stance, of the different orders of things " receiving 
each as high a mode of divine influence as its sev- 
eral nature will allow " (p. 174) ; and he, therefore, 
undeniably recognizes some rerum naturam, as a 
condition or datum for the reception of divine power. 
Indeed, the whole spirit and character of the book 
proclaim its affinities with a school quite remote 
from the Spinozistic. The author has nowhere 
stated the principles of his ethical doctrine, or bridged 
over the chasm which separates it from his theology. 
But the purity and depth of his conceptions of char- 
acter, his intense abhorrence of falsehood and evil, 
the moral loftiness of his devotion, and the generous 
severity of his rebuke, are in the strongest contradic- 
tion to serene complacency of a mind, suspended in 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 201 

metaphysic elevation above the point where truth 
and error, right and wrong, diverge, and looking 
down from a station whence all things appear equal- 
ly divine. Hear the account he gives of " Solid 
Piety," or "Love before God " : — 

" Its Deity is the God of Love, within whose encircling 
arms it is beautiful to be. The demands it makes are to 
keep the Law he has written in the heart, to be good, to 
do good ; to love man, to love God. It may use forms, 
prayers, dogmas, ceremonies, priests, temples, sabbaths, 
festivals, and fasts, yes, sacrifices if it will, as means, not 
ends ; symbols of a sentiment, not substitutes for it. Its 
substance is love of God ; its form, love of man ; its temple, 
a pure heart ; its sacrifice, a divine life. The end it pro- 
poses is, to reunite the man with God, till he thinks God's 
thought, which is Truth ; feels God's feeling, which is 
Love ; wills God's will, which is the eternal Right : thus 
finding God in the sense wherein he is not far from any 
one of us ; becoming one with him, and so partaking the 
divine nature. The means to this high end are an extinc- 
tion of all in man that opposes God's law ; a perfect obe- 
dience to him as he speaks in Reason, Conscience, Affec- 
tion. It leads through active obedience to an absolute 
trust, a perfect love ; to the complete harmony of the finite 
man with the infinite God, and man's will coalesces in that 
of him who is All in All. Then Faith and Knowledge are 
the same thing, Reason and Revelation do not conflict, 
Desire and Duty go hand in hand, and strew man's path 
with flowers. Desire has become dutiful, and Duty desira- 
ble. The divine spirit incarnates itself in the man. The 
riddle of the world is solved. Perfect love casts out fear. 
Then Religion demands no particular actions, forms, or 
modes of thought. The man's ploughing is holy as his 



202 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

prayer ; his daily bread as the smoke of his sacrifice ; his 
home sacred as his temple ; his work-day and his sabbath 
are alike God's day. His priest is the holy spirit within 
him ; Faith and Works, his communion of both kinds. He 
does not sacrifice Reason to Religion, nor Religion to Rea- 
son. Brother and Sister, they dwell together in Love. A 
life harmonious and beautiful, conducted by Rectitude, filled 
full with Truth and enchanted by Love to man and God, — 
this is the service he pays to the Father of All. Belief 
does not take the place of life. Capricious austerity atones 
for no duty left undone. He loves Religion as a bride, for 
her own sake, not for what she brings. He lies low in the 
hand of God. The breath of the Father is on him. 

" If joy comes to this man, he rejoices in its rosy light. 
His Wealth, his Wisdom, his Power, is not for himself 
alone, but for all God's children. Nothing is his which a 
brother needs more than he. Like God himself, he is kind 
to the thankless and unmerciful. Purity without and Piety 
within ; these are his Heaven, both present and to come. 
Is not his flesh as holy as his soul, — his body a temple of 
God? 

" If trouble comes on him, which Prudence could not 
foresee, nor Strength overcome, nor Wisdom escape from, 
he bears it with a heart serene and full of peace. Over 
every gloomy cavern, and den of despair, Hope arches her 
rainbow ; the ambrosial light descends. Religion shows 
him, that, out of desert rocks, black and savage, where the 
Vulture has her home, where the Storm and Avalanche are 
born, and whence they descend, to crush and to kill ; out 
of these hopeless cliffs falls the river of life, which flows 
for all, and makes glad the people of God. When the 
Storm and Avalanche sweep from him all that is dearest to 
mortal hope, is he comfortless ? Out of the hard marble 
of Life, the deposition of a few joys and many sorrows, of 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 203 

birth and death, and smiles and grief, he hews him the 
beautiful statue of religious Tranquillity. It stands ever 
beside him, with the smile of heavenly satisfaction on its 
lip, and its trusting finger pointing to the sky." — B. I. Ch. 
VII. § 3, p. 145. 

The objections which we have brought against our 
author's Theistical doctrine extend themselves to his 
views of Inspiration. To examine them, however, 
within the remaining limits of this article, is impossi- 
ble. To draw a precise line of discrimination be- 
tween the Divine and the Human mind, and pro- 
nounce, as to the range of our own faculties, what 
may be included without presumption, and what ex- 
cluded without enthusiasm, is one of the most diffi- 
cult problems of religious philosophy. That Dr. 
Priestley's denial of all Divine Influence, because no 
miracles could be found going on in the mind, did 
not settle the question, is acknowledged by a piety 
that is wiser than philosophy, if not by a philosophy 
that would be wiser than piety. We feel no less as- 
sured that Theodore Parker has not settled it, by 
simply calling the ordinary faculties of men by the 
name of God's Inspiration, and treating the Principia 
of Newton as the work of an inspired man. Were 
we to attempt a solution, we should commence from 
the division, before stated, of all Agency into the two 
categories of the Human Will, and the Divine Will : 
we should endeavor to determine the circle of the 
former; and whatever lay wholly beyond it, though 
still within the limits of Consciousness and of Law, 
we should refer to the latter. Not every thing, how- 
ever, that must be ascribed immediately to God, can 



204 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

be called Inspiration. He acts out of the Spirit, 
or in Nature , as well as within the Spirit, or in our 
Soul; and we must, therefore, again exclude the 
whole of the former sphere, and reserve only the 
characteristic faculties of Man. If it were main- 
tained that there were a plurality of these, a further 
reduction might be allowed, till the attribute alone 
remained which manifests itself in worship, — the 
consciousness of moral distinctions, and reverence 
for moral excellence and beauty. "Whatever gifts 
are found in this province of the soul, which are not 
the produce of human will ; which have been neither 
learned nor earned ; which, without the touch of any 
voluntary process, appear in mysterious spontaneity ; 
are strictly the Inspiration of God. Thoughts of 
God, purposes of constraining pity, sanctities of duty, 
rising above the level horizon of the mind, silent, 
self-evidencing, holy, clearing themselves, like the 
pure stars, as they ascend, of the low mists of doubt 
and fear, — these will ever be deemed true heaven- 
lights kindled from the eternal fires, whatever vol- 
umes be written to prove them only gas-lamps, dis- 
tilled from the embers of past pain and pleasure in 
the transforming alembic of the brain. Inspiration 
would thus be to the highest faculty what Instinct 
is to the lower ; a guidance coming of its own ac- 
cord, — which we know cannot lead wrong, yet 
which we cannot prove to be right. Happily, it 
needs no proof; for there is the same conscience, 
latent, though not awake, in all ; sunk no doubt in 
various depths of slumber, but in some ever ready 
to apprehend and recognize the truth which higher 



THEODORE PARKERS DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 205 

souls may find. To such it passes, telling, as at 
first, its own divine tale. To others, with whom, 
when they have heard it in the word, and seen it in 
the life, it does not authorize itself, it simply cannot 
pass at all. " Surely," it will be said, " these are 
just the cases for a miracle, — and where the Resur- 
rection would powerfully tell." Not in the least ; — 
" If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither 
will they be persuaded though one rose from the 
dead." 

We differ, then, from our author in this : that he 
admits, and we exclude, in treating of Inspiration, 
the voluntary products to which the mind gives birth. 
All learning, all Science, all work in achievement 
of a preconceived end, we take to be disentitled to 
the name. In justification of his question, " Is New- 
ton less inspired than Simon Peter?" Theodore 
Parker, substituting Moses for Simon Peter, ob- 
serves : — 

" No candid man will doubt that, humanly speaking, it 
was a more difficult thing to write the Principia than the 
Decalogue. Man must have a nature most sadly anomalous, 
if, unassisted, he is able to accomplish all the triumphs of 
modern science, and yet cannot discover the plainest and 
most important principles of Religion and Morality without 
a miraculous revelation." — B. II. Ch. VIII. p. 218, note. 

Now that the amount of inspiration in an achieve- 
ment should be measured by the difficulty and labor 
spent upon it, appears unreasonable on the princi- 
ples which we have stated. Let the product be at 
all of a kind to be yielded by the successive steps of 
18 



206 

a toilsome process, and it is a thing of voluntary fab- 
rication ; and, by those who can so conceive of it, 
will never be regarded as an inspired creation. The 
disposition to extend the idea of inspiration to ab- 
stract or scientific truth appears also in an attempt, 
on which we look with strong repugnance, to ren- 
der Christianity independent of the individuality of 
Christ. " If," says our author, " Christianity be true 
at all, it would be just as true if Herod or Catiline 
had taught it." (p. 244.) Yet the same writer who 
could set down this painful paradox has said, with- 
in thirty pages of it, " A foolish man, as such, can- 
not be inspired to reveal wisdom ; nor a wicked man 
to reveal virtue; nor an impious man to reveal re- 
ligion ; unto him that hath, more is given 

The greater, purer, loftier, more complete the char- 
acter, so is the inspiration." (p. 221.) Then surely 
the suggested combination of a " true Christianity " 
with a wicked Christ, is no less absurd than it is re- 
volting. If, indeed, as is usually assumed, inspira- 
tion implied intellectual infallibility in matters of 
doctrinal knowledge, and could be evidenced by dis- 
plays of miraculous power, character might be dis- 
pensed with in a divine messenger; and the alleged 
grounds of supernatural authority in the religion 
would be undisturbed, though its revealer were " a 
Herod or a Catiline." On the principles of this sys- 
tem, the moral perfectness of Christ is not an essen- 
tial, but a subsidiary, support to Christianity; — a 
delightful confirmation of his mission, but not a con- 
dition on which we are at liberty to stake our faith 
in him. " Prove what you will against his life," 



THEODORE PARKER'S DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 207 

might it then be said, " his attested doctrine re- 
mains." " Prove what you will against his doc- 
trine," would we rather say, " his divine life remains ; 
and with more ' truth ' in it, than in any proposition 
in the Bible or out of it," No revelation of duty is 
possible except through the Conscience ; and Con- 
science cannot be effectually reached but by the 
presence of a holier life and a higher spirit. From 
the spectacle of devoted excellence and saintly beauty 
of mind, as from nothing else, flashes down upon us 
the awful and redeemig sense of new obligation : the 
thing seen in the concrete becomes conviction in the 
abstract : and a religion lived passes into a religion 
believed. And so we regard it as a rule in matters 
of devout faith, that it is reverence for persons which 
gives perception of truth in ideas. 

Had our author shared our full persuasion that 
this rule is true, he would not have diffused his " in- 
spiration " so widely over the human race. Filled 
with the idea, that religious and moral guidance are 
the most indispensable of God's gifts, he loosely in- 
fers their universality. He is resolved to snatch such 
precious blessings from all dependence on special 
causes. He esteems the Reason, Conscience, and 
religious Sentiment, with which God has endowed 
us, fully adequate to their manifest end ; and has 
the firmest confidence that every man, faithful to 
their suggestions, may know what is true of God, 
love what is good in life, and do what is right in 
duty. He not only scorns the claim of any possible 
outward authority over these powers, but makes 
light of any outward helps to them ; and though de- 



208 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

voutly thankful for the disclosure in Christ of " the 
highest possibility of human nature," is anxious to 
disclaim the kind of reliance on him which is usually 
welcome to the disciple's heart. "We confess that 
this sometimes gives to our author's position an air 
of Stoical isolation, on which we look, at best, with 
more admiration than sympathy. Moreover, the 
doctrine of which it is the result is, we are persuad- 
ed, a mistake. Outward sources of religion are just 
as needful to us as inward faculties ; and without 
the beings given to our experience, an utter barren- 
ness would attach to the constitution given to our 
souls. Reason and Conscience are not, as some- 
times called, " the light" but only the eye, of faith ; 
which first has vision, when the lustre of pure and 
great natures is shed on it through the atmosphere 
of life. Not only are some external conditions indis- 
pensable to us ; but these human experiences, and no 
other ; this commerce of souls ; this wondering look, 
to see how greatness and wisdom manage the prob- 
lem of life. For what is called " Natural Theology," 
which a man is supposed to get by studying all 
sorts of things inferior to himself, and making a 
lonely scientific expedition through earth and air and 
water, we have but a small esteem. Well as a sup- 
plement, it is naught as the substance, of religion. 
Faith comes, we are persuaded, through the moral 
elements of our nature, by the presence of spiritual 
causes above us, not by the observation of material 
effects beneath us. Hence all great religions have 
been historical : the thorough interweaving of all the 
roots of Christianity with the history of the world 



on which it has sprung, is at once a source of its 
power and an assurance of its divineness ; and the 
attempt to give it an abstract character, to loosen its 
connection with the individuality of Christ, and dis- 
engage from it a metaphysical indestructibility called 
" Absolute Religion," is a mistake, in our opinion, 
not only of its particular genius, but of the universal 
springs of human Faith. 

In fact, we can find no rest in any view of Revela- 
tion short of that which pervades the fourth Gospel, 
and which is everywhere implicated in the folds of 
the Logos-doctrine ; that it is an appearance, to beings 
who have something of a divine spirit within them, of 
a yet diviner without them, leading them to the Di- 
vine st of all, that embraces them both. No doubt, this 
conception, while it adheres to the necessity of an 
historical mediator, generalizes the idea of Inspira- 
tion ; renders it impossible to affirm, that God has 
never touched any human heart out of the circle of 
the Hebrew nation ; and leaves to Jesus simply a 
transcendent preeminence, — the very preeminence 
claimed for him, that he " had the Spirit without 
measure" that we can gauge. That this was the 
doctrine of the Christian Fathers, who did not deny 
a portion of the divine Logos to the wise and good 
among the Heathens, is known to every reader of 
the ancient Apologies,* and ought to protect it in the 

* See Justin Mart. Apol. II. cap. 13. Ovk aXXorpid eWt ra IlXa- 
tcovos bibaynara tov Xptoroi), d\X* ovk cart ttclvtx] ojjloici, wo-jrep 
ovdi ra tcov akXcov, Stghkgjv re, kcu TroirjTCdv, kcu (rvyypcKpccov • e/ca- 
aros yap tls dirb fi€povs tov o~7T€pp,aTiKov delov Xoyov to crvyyeves 
opuv KaXcos i(j)6ey£aTO. 

18* 



210 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

eyes of those who want an authority for their truth 
more than truth for their authority. And is it not 
childish to insist on putting out all other lights, in 
order to make sure that the Christ may shine ? Is 
his glory so doubtful and obscure, that it is discern- 
ible only in the dark, and that the faint fires of God, 
eternal in the human soul, must be damped down, 
ere we can see the bright and morning star ? If the 
elevation of Jesus is real, it is not changed by filling 
up the approaches to him with ranks of glorious 
minds and groups of holy lives, fitted, by the glow 
of the same spirit and fraternity of the same class, 
to own him as the Perfecter of their faith, and look 
up to him in his Kingly height as the crown of their 
pyramid of souls. That the " authority" of Christ 
over men should require his cold isolation from men, 
so that, in his particular characteristics as our guide, 
he should be extrinsic to our race, is perfectly incon- 
ceivable to us. Why, God himself has no " author- 
ity " over us, but in virtue of attributes which he has 
made common to our nature with his own, and in 
which we are separated from him in degree and not 
in kind. And where, after all, is the ultimate " au- 
thority " of our religion to be found ? Who will 
show us the real seat of the " primitive Christianity" 
of which all disciples are in quest ? Shall we take 
the first four centuries, and interpret the concurrent 
tones of their voices into the certain oracle of God ? 
Not so, you say ; for the writers of that period were 
full of the errors prevailing around them : and they 
themselves refer us to an anterior generation, as im- 
parting legitimacy to the doctrines which they teach. 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 211 

Shall we go, then, to that earlier generation, and 
abide by the words of the Apostolic age ? Scarcely 
this either, you will say ; for the marks are too plain 
that there is no unerring certainty here : the Apostles 
themselves were not without their differences ; and 
even their unanimity could mistake, for they con- 
fessedly taught the near approach of the end of the 
world. They, too, still refer us upward, and take 
every thing from Christ. To Christ, then, let us go. 
"Wherein resides the " authority " in him which we 
are to accept as " final " ? Shall we say, — in his 
reported ivords wherever found ; — his statements 
are conclusive, and exempt from doubt ? Impossi- 
ble ! Who can affirm that he had, and that he ut- 
tered, no ideas imbibed from his age, and obsolete 
when that age was gone ; that he grew up to man- 
hood in the Galilean province without a sentiment, 
an expectation, native to place and time ; or that he 
disrobed himself of his whole natural mind from the 
instant of his baptism ; that he did not discern evil 
spirits in the poor patients that came to him, and so 
misinterpret his own miracles ; that he raised no 
hopes in others of sitting on twelve thrones, judging 
the twelve tribes of Israel ; of drinking with him of 
the fruit of the vine at his table in his kingdom ; and 
of his own return to fulfil all these things " within 
that generation " ? Will any one plainly say, with 
these things before him, that Jesus was infallible, and 
that in his spoken language we have a standard of 
doctrinal truth ? And if error was possible, who will 
give us an external test by which we may know the 
region of its absence and of its presence ? for, with- 



212 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

out this, to talk of his words being " a rule of faith " 
is a delusion or a pretence. But why this Heathen- 
ish craving for an " oracle," turning the Galilean hills 
into a Delphi, Jesus into a Pythoness, and degrading 
the Gospels into Sibylline books ? Did Christ ask 
for this blind, implicit trust ? Did he wish his dis- 
ciples to believe his word, because it was true, — or 
the truth, because it was his word ? Nay, did not he 
also refer us to something higher, and hint at an au- 
thority needful to authorize his own ? Thither, then, 
we must retreat, if indeed we would find " Primitive 
Christianity." Behind all the communicated beliefs 
of Jesus lie his felt beliefs, with the question, a What 
made them his ? " Whence his holy trust in them ? 
for in his soul, also, they had a justifying origin. 
He thought them, he loved them, he worshipped in 
them, he struggled under them, before he published 
them : by what mark did he know them to be di- 
vine ? Does any one really suppose that he would 
refuse to believe them, unless his senses could have 
a physical demonstration, unless the Infinite Spirit 
would talk audibly with him in the vernacular 
tongue, and give him His word for them, and show 
off some proof-miracles to satisfy his doubts ? And 
if it were found out that there was no breach of the 
Eternal Silence, no phantasms floating between the 
uplifted eye of the Nazarene and the quiet stars, 
would you say that it was all over with our faith, 
and its divine original clean gone ? Surely not. It 
will not be questioned that the Inspiration of Jesus 
was within the soul : by the powers that dwelt there, 
he knew the thoughts to be divine and holy as they 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 213 

dropped on his meditations : and the authorizing 
point of all his treasures of heavenly truth and grace 
dwelt in his Reason, Conscience, and Faith. Here, 
then, is the fountain of all, the primitive seat of in- 
spiration, the true religion of Christ, — that which 
he felt and followed, not that which he spake and led. 
And those are the most genuine disciples, who stand 
with him at the same spring ; who are ready for the 
same trust ; and can disengage themselves from tra- 
dition, pretence, and fear, at the bidding of the same 
source of Inspiration. 

The critical opinions of Theodore Parker on the 
origin and contents of the Hebrew and Christian 
records, we do not propose to discuss. Indeed, they 
are so cursorily presented in his book, that to ex- 
amine the grounds of them would be to travel far 
beyond the materials before us. His judgment on 
the historical evidence for the miracles has been the 
subject of comment in a former article. In that 
judgment we do not concur. But if there is any 
one who, for that judgment, chooses to denounce 
him as " no Christian " ; who conceives that a liter- 
ary verdict, referring the Gospels to the second cen- 
tury instead of the first, outlaws a man from "the 
kingdom of God " ; who can read this book, and 
suppose in his heart that here is a man whom Jesus 
would have driven from the company of disciples ; 
we can only wish that the accuser's title to the name 
were as obvious as the accused's. Alas for this poor 
wrangling ! To hear the boastful anger of our stout 
believers, one would suppose that to take up our 
faith on too easy terms, and to be drawn into dis- 



214 



MARTINEATTS MISCELLANIES. 



cipleship less by logic than by love, were the very 
Sin against the Holy Ghost ! Jesus thought it might 
not be too much to expect of his enemies, that, being 
eyewitnesses, they might " believe his works " ; but 
of his friends it was the mark, that they would " be- 
lieve him" But now-a-days, who are our " patient 
Christians," ever busy with indictments against all 
counterfeits ? Why, men who think it supremely 
ridiculous to accept any thing or being as divine, 
unless visible certificates of character be written on 
earth, air, and water, and Heaven will pawn the 
laws of nature as personal securities. 

We part with Theodore Parker in hope to meet 
again. He has, we are persuaded, a task, severe 
perhaps, but assuredly noble, to achieve in this world. 
The work we have reviewed is the confession, at the 
threshold of a high career, of a great Reforming soul, 
that has thus cleared itself of hinderance, and girded 
up itself for a faithful future. The slowness of suc- 
cess awaiting those who stand apart from the multi- 
tude will not dismay him. He knows the ways of 
Providence too well : — 

" Institutions arise as they are needed, and fall when their 
work is done. Of these things nothing is fixed. Corporeal 
despotism is getting ended ; will the spiritual tyranny last 
for ever ? A will above our puny strength marshals the 
race of men, using our freedom, virtue, folly, as instru- 
ments to one vast end, — the harmonious development of 
man. We see the art of God in the web of the spider, and 
the cell of a bee, but have not skill to discern it in the 
march of man. We repine at the slowness of the future 
in coming, or the swiftness of the past in fleeing away ; 



THEODORE PARKER^ DISCOURSE OF RELIGION. 



215 



we sigh for the fabled c Millennium ' to advance, or pray 
Time to restore us the Age of Gold. It avails nothing. We 
cannot hurry God, nor retard him. Old schools and new 
schools seem as men that stand on the shore of some Atlan- 
tic bay, and shout, to frighten back the tide, or urge it on. 
What boots their cry ? Gently the sea swells under the 
moon, and, in the hour of God's appointment, the tranquil 
tide rolls in, to inlet and river, to lave the rocks, to bear on 
its bosom the ship of the merchant, the weeds of the sea. 
We complain, as our fathers ; let us rather rejoice, for ques- 
tions less weighty than these have in other ages been settled 
only with the point of the sword and the thunder of cannon. 
" If the opinions advanced in this discourse be correct, 
then Religion is above all institutions, and can never fail : 
they shall perish, but Religion endure ; they shall wax old 
as a garment ; they shall be changed, and the places that 
knew them shall know them no more for ever ; but Re- 
ligion is ever the same, and its years shall have no end. ,, 
— p. 484. 



PHASES OF FAITH* 

[From the Prospective Review for August, 1850.] 

This book is a necessary Appendix to the author's 
former Treatise on the Soul. In that work he pre- 
sented a scheme of positive Religion, founded essen- 
tially on psychological experience, and asking for no 
data beyond the mind's own consciousness in the 
exercise of its highest affections. Its object and 
method were constructive : and in evolving an ade- 
quate faith from the inner life of human spirit, he 
could spare only an incidental notice for doctrines 
and modes of procedure at variance with his own. 
He there unfolded the truths which respect our spir- 
itual relations according to the order in which, as 
he conceives, they ought to be thought out. This, 
however, is not the order in which he himself has 
actually reached them ; still less does it agree with 
the ordinary path of approach to them. All Chris- 
tians conceive themselves indebted to an historical 
revelation, concurrently with the intimations of their 



* Phases of Faith: or Passages from the History of my Creed. 
By Francis William Newman, formerly Fellow of Baliol College, 
Oxford. London: Chapman. 1850. 



PHASES OF FAITH. 217 

own nature, for their most inspiring convictions : and 
with Mr. Newman himself, they are not a fresh ac- 
quisition won by his present mode of thought, but 
a residue left uncancelled by the mental changes 
through which he has passed, and provided by an 
after-thought with their new title to continued pos- 
session. The present publication describes the pro- 
cesses by which the author, from a commencement 
in Calvinism, reached at length the religion of " The 
Soul." It contains his apology for dispensing en- 
tirely with all external aids, — miracle or prophecy, 
Bible or Church, — in the establishment of a Faith ; 
and for limiting himself to sources purely subjective. 
It defends his isolated position by tracing the invol- 
untary encroachments of scepticism, as reflection 
and knowledge increased and imparted a freer action 
to his mind ; till the ever-narrowing circumference of 
his ecclesiastical and Scriptural belief drove him at 
last upon his own centre, and left him as a point 
alone amid the infinitude of God. As the course of 
change was exceedingly gradual, and every stage of 
it is successively vindicated, the book is necessarily 
a kind of running criticism on almost every Chris- 
tian creed, and the whole circle of Christian eviden- 
ces ; and elicits in each case a negative result. By 
this aggressive process nothing is brought out of 
which Mr. Newman's previous book had not given 
ample notice. Yet to most of his readers this whol- 
ly destructive character will assuredly be painful ; 
and many who, with ourselves, have been penetrat- 
ed with affectionate admiration for his transparent 
truthfulness and elevation of soul, will feel it a sor- 
19 



218 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

row to lose the sympathy of such a mind in some 
of their most cherished persuasions. The earlier 
treatise so abounded in passages of solemn and ten- 
der devotion, that the reader was borne on the 
wing over the chasms in its faith, and no more felt 
its doubts than he would pause upon a heresy let 
fal] in prayer. But the present work cannot, from 
its very nature, bespeak the affections by any such 
preengagement. It is rigorously logical : and though 
the author's fearlessness is manifestly the simple in- 
spiration of a pure and trustful heart, yet the relent- 
less way in which he follows out a single line of 
thought, and hurries you along it as if it were the 
whole surface of the truth, provokes something of 
natural resistance. You feel yourself in the pres- 
ence of a mind wholly incapable of the least moral 
unfairness or ingenious self-deception, and devoted 
with absolute singleness to the quest of the true and 
the good : but, at the same time, too much distin- 
guished by intellectual impetuosity, and the intense 
flow of sympathies in one particular channel, to at- 
tain a judicial largeness of view. Hence the work 
produces all its effect at once : and while many will 
utter warnings against reading it at all, our counsel 
would be to read it twice. For ourselves at least we 
must confess that, where our admiration and even 
reverence are so strongly enlisted, we are apt to be 
carried away at first beyond the bounds of our per- 
manent convictions ; to take over-precautions against 
our own prejudgments ; and yield ourselves too free- 
ly to the hand of a guidance felt to be generous and 
noble : and it requires time and calm review to re- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 219 

cover from the mingled self-distrust and sympathy 
with which such companionship as our author's in- 
spires us. 

To the earlier part of this book singular freshness 
is given by its autobiographical form, and the perfect 
simplicity with which it lays open every state of mind 
bearing on the subsequent developments of opin- 
ion. The sketch so slightly given of the thought- 
ful and serious schoolboy, derided by hearts yet free 
from the claim of God, and comforted by the kindly 
clergyman who could read the spirit at work with- 
in ; of the youth at Confirmation, chilled by the dry 
questions of the Examiner, and repelled by the 
sleeves and formality of the Bishop ; of the Fresh- 
man at Oxford, signing the Articles in all the joy of 
passionate belief, and then finding that among com- 
panions they were objects of general indifference ; 
will wake in many a heart affecting memories of 
life's most fervid and fruitful hours. How far his re- 
ligious life might have found a less troubled devel- 
opment, had it commenced under a simpler scheme 
of doctrine, we will not pretend to decide. But it is 
evident that so active an intellect, inclosed within 
the complicated economy of Calvinism, gave his 
faith no chance of long repose : and during his un- 
dergraduate course many questions had arisen, on 
the imputation of Christ's righteousness, on the ob- 
ligation of the Sabbath, on the ground of difference 
between the Mosaic sacrifices and the Christian 
Atonement, on the meaning of the words " One " 
and " Three " in the Athanasian Creed, all of which 
he had answered in an unorthodox sense. But, 



220 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

above all, he had given up the doctrine of Infant 
Baptism, and on this account was almost deterred 
from the re-signature essential to his Bachelor's de- 
gree. Though he overcame his scruples thus far, 
they exercised a most important influence on the 
subsequent course of his life; deterring him from 
entering the Church; determining (we imagine) 
the class of Christians (the Baptists) whose commun- 
ion he was afterwards to join ; and bringing out for 
the first time that strong contrast between the broth- 
ers Newman, which has become so striking in its re- 
sults. We have often heard the remark, that the 
radical characteristics of these two men are essen- 
tially the same ; that the great problem of faith pre- 
sented itself under like conditions to both ; that their 
solutions, opposite as they seem, exhaust the logical 
alternative of the case, and are but the positive and 
negative roots of one equation ; and that, but for ac- 
cidental causes, or the overbalance of a casual feel- 
ing, their paths might never have diverged. Upon the 
evidence of their writings, this estimate has always 
appeared to us curiously false : and a passage in the 
present volume, which exhibits the divergence at its 
commencement, corrects the opinion in a manner 
deeply instructive. Speaking of his crisis of diffi- 
culty respecting Baptism, our author says : — 

" One person there was at Oxford who might have 
seemed my natural adviser : his name, character, and relig- 
ious peculiarities have been so made public property, that I 
need not shrink to name him : — I mean my elder brother, 
the Rev. John Henry Newman. As a warm-hearted and 
generous brother, who exercised towards me paternal cares, 



PHASES OF FAITH. 221 

I esteemed him and felt a deep gratitude ; as a man of va- 
rious culture and peculiar genius, I admired and was proud 
of him ; but my doctrinal religion impeded my loving him 
as much as he deserved, and even justified my feeling some 
distrust of him. He never showed any strong attraction 
towards those whom I regarded as spiritual persons : on the 
contrary, I thought him stiff and cold towards them. More- 
over, soon after his ordination, he had startled and dis- 
tressed me by adopting the doctrine of Baptismal Regener- 
ation ; and, in rapid succession, worked out views which I 
regarded as full-blown ' Popery.' I speak of the years 
1823 - 6 : it is strange to think that twenty years more had 
to pass before he learnt the place to which his doctrines be- 
longed. 

" In the earliest period of my Oxford residence, I fell in- 
to uneasy collision with him concerning Episcopal powers. 
I had on one occasion dropt something disrespectful against 
Bishops or a Bishop, something which, if it had been said 
about a Clergyman, would have passed unnoticed ; but my 
brother checked and reproved me, — as I thought very un- 
instructively, — for c wanting reverence towards Bishops/ 
I knew not then, and I know not now, why Bishops, as such, 
should be more reverenced than common clergymen ; or 

Clergymen, as such, more than common men I 

was willing to honor a Lord Bishop as a Peer of Parliament, 
but his office was to me no guaranty of spiritual eminence. 
To find my brother thus stop my mouth, was a puzzle ; and 
impeded all free speech towards him." — p. 10. 

Whence this incapacity for sympathy between 
two minds, both noble, both affectionate, trained in 
the same home, enriched by the same culture, in- 
tent upon the same ends ? With reasoning powers 
equally acute, and equally uncorrupted by passion or 
19* 



222 MARTINEAtr's MISCELLANIES. 

by self, they could not have found concurrence im- 
possible, had it been within the resources of logic or 
of faithfulness. The difference, we are persuaded, 
ascends behind these, and lies in the original data 
from which each inquirer proceeded as his primary 
conditions of belief: and we conceive that difference 
to be one which radically separates Catholic from 
Evangelical Churches, rendering their approxima- 
tion intrinsically impossible, and limiting each to the 
range of one class of minds. A passing remark of 
our author's unconsciously opens to us the seat of 
this difference. 

" For any one to avow that Regeneration took place in 
Baptism, seemed to me little short of a confession that he had 
never himself experienced what Regeneration is" — p. 15. 

The new birth, — that is to say, — is something 
which must be felt, and felt under riper conditions 
than those of the infant Soul ; felt as a lifted weight 
of sin, a broken bondage of self, a free surrender to 
the will of a forgiving God. This reconciliation of 
heart, this joyful spring of free affection into the in- 
finite arms, is a fact in the history of thousands: 
and to him who knows it, it is vain to speak of any 
other Regeneration. To tell him that the sprinkled 
babe, in whom he sees nothing supervene, and who 
is evidently conscious of nothing but the water- 
drops, undergoes the stupendous change of a Divine 
adoption, seems to him to degrade the Economy 
of Heaven to a level with the arts of conjuring. 
When God breaks into the human soul, shall it be 
without a trace ? Must he not shake it to its cen- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 223 

tre ? and as he obliterates its guilt, shall there be no 
sense of clearness, and no tears of joy to make a 
fruitful place for every seed of holiness ? Thus the 
Evangelical insists on consciousness as an indispen- 
sable evidence of a divine change ; and can accept 
nothing as spiritual except what declares itself with- 
in the human spirit, and exalts its highest action: 
and further, the kind of experience for which he 
looks is not possible to every mind, but is incident 
especially to passionate and impulsive souls. Not 
all good men, however, are formed in this mould : 
many who devoutly seek a union with God, and 
who believe a new birth to be the prerequisite condi- 
tion, are never vividly conscious of any Divine irrup- 
tion for the emancipation of their nature : and for 
the erasure of guilt and the visitation of grace they 
must look back beyond the period of memory to the 
cradle of their life, and its earliest consecration : 
when they were born of water, they were doubtless 
born of the spirit too. True the saving touch was 
reported to them by no feeling : but are there not se- 
cret workings of God? and shall we deny Him 
because his approach is gentle, and his spirit, instead 
of tearing us in storm, spreads through us insensibly 
like a purifying atmosphere? What hinders him 
from redeeming and improving a nature that knows 
not its benefactor except by faith? If his presence 
lurks throughout unconscious Nature, and is the un- 
felt source of all the beauty, life, and order there, by 
what right can we affirm that his Spirit cannot 
evade our consciousness ? According to this view, 
which dispenses with the evidence of personal expe- 



224 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

rience, the Soul, in the reception of grace, is regard- 
ed externally, as a natural object submitted to the 
disinfecting influence of God : and the Divine Spirit 
is treated as a kind of physical power of transcend- 
ent efficacy, — or at least as an agency permeating 
physical natures, and so refining them as to trans- 
figure them into spiritual life. No exact boundary is 
here drawn between the realm of sense and that of 
spirit, — between the material energy and the moral 
interposition of God ; — they melt into one another 
under the mediation of a kind of spiritual chemistry, 
descending into organic force on the one hand, and 
rising into the inspiration of holiness on the other. 
This appears to us to be the conception which un- 
derlies the peculiarities of Catholicism. Hence the 
invariable presence of some physical element in all 
that it looks upon as venerable. Its rites are a ma- 
nipular invocation of God. Its miracles are exam- 
ples of incarnate divineness in old clothes and wink- 
ing pictures. Its ascetic discipline is founded on the 
notion of a gradual consumption of the grosser body 
by the encroaching fire of the spirit; till in the estati- 
ca the frame itself becomes ethereal, and the light 
shines through. Nothing can be more offensive than 
all this to the Evangelical conception; which plants 
the natural and the spiritual in irreconcilable con- 
tradiction, denies to them all approach or contact, 
and allows each to exist only by the extinction of 
the other. They belong virtually to opposite influ- 
ences, — of Satan and of God. They follow oppo- 
site methods, — of necessary law and of free grace. 
They are cognizable by opposite faculties, — of sense 



PHASES OF FAITH. 225 

and understanding on the one hand ; of the soul up- 
on the other. This unmediated dualism follows the 
Evangelical into his theory as to the state of each 
individual soul before God. The Catholic does not 
deny all divine light to the natural conscience or all 
power to the natural will of unconverted men : he 
maintains that these also are already under a law of 
obligation, may do what is well pleasing before God, 
and by superior faithfulness qualify themselves to 
become subjects of grace; so that the Gospel shall 
come upon them as a divine supplement to the sad 
and feeble moral life of nature. To the Evangelical, 
on the contrary, the soul that is not saved is lost ; 
the corruption before regeneration, and the sanctifica- 
tion after it, are alike complete and without degree ; 
and the best works of the unconverted, far from hav- 
ing any tendency to bring them to Christ, are of the 
nature of sin. So, again, the contrast turns up in the 
opposite views taken of the divine economy in hu- 
man affairs. The Evangelical detaches the elect in 
his imagination from the remaining mass of men, 
sequesters them as a holy people, who must not mix 
themselves with the affairs of Belial. He withdraws 
the Church from the world, and watches lest any 
bridge of transition should smooth the way for a 
mingling of their feelings and pursuits. The more 
spiritual he is, the more will he abstain from politi- 
cal action, and find the whole business of govern- 
ment to be made up of problems which he cannot 
touch. The Catholic, looking on the natural uni- 
verse, whether material or human, not as the antag- 
onist, but as the receptacle, of the spiritual, seeks to 



226 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

conquer the World for the Church, and, instead of 
shunning political action, is ready to grasp it as his 
instrument. As the Gospel is, in his view, but the 
supplement to natural Law, so is the Church but 
the climax of Government, — a Divine Polity for 
ruling the world in affairs of Religion. It was for 
want of this view that the younger Newman, while 
able to honor a Bishop " as a Peer of Parliament" 
(irrespective of the legislative faculties of the indi- 
vidual,) could pay no homage to his church functions, 
but, the moment he turned to these, looked only at 
the personal qualities of the man. The elder broth- 
er, preserving the analogy between the temporal and 
the spiritual constitution of the human world, recog- 
nized a corporate rule for both relations ; and saw no 
reason why, if office were a ground of reverence in an 
earthly polity, it should have no respect in a divine. 
We might carry this comparison of the two schemes 
into much greater detail, without any straining of 
its fundamental principle. But we must content 
ourselves with the summary statement that, while 
(1.) the worldly and unreligious live wholly in the 
natural and ignore the spiritual ; and (2.) the Evan- 
gelical lives wholly in the spiritual as incompatible 
with the natural; (3.) the Catholic seeks to subju- 
gate the natural (as he conceives God does) by in- 
terpenetration of the spiritual. The tendency to the 
one or the other of these religious conceptions marks 
the distinction between two great families of minds. 
The more impulsive and loving natures, whose good 
and evil are alike remote from self, — who find it an 
ill business to manage themselves, but can do all 



PHASES OF FAITH. 227 

things by the inspiration of affection, — who detest 
prudence and are perverse against authority, but are 
docile as a child to one that trusts them with his ten- 
derness, — are necessarily drawn to the Evangelical 
side. Where the Will, on the other hand, has a 
greater strength, and the Conscience a minuter vigi- 
lance ; where emotion is less susceptible of extremes, 
and persistent disicpline is more possible ; there re- 
ligion w T ill appear to be less a conquest of the soul 
by Divine aggression, than a home administration 
quietly propagated from within ; and the Catholic 
(which is also the Unitarian) conception will prevail. 
Intellectual power may attach itself indifferently to 
either side. But, if we mistake not, the imaginative 
faculty can scarcely coexist in any high degree with 
the Evangelical type of thought. Its tendency on this 
side is always to romance, which is the invariable 
sign of feeble imagination ; inasmuch as it totally 
separates the real from the ideal, and keeps them 
apart like two worlds to be occupied in turns, — the 
dull and earthly, — the glorious and divine. In the 
Catholic theory, where the perceptive powers are 
less despised, and the natural and physical world 
is deemed not incapable of being the receptacle of 
God, the sense of Beauty has free range : it medi- 
ates betwen the spheres that else would lie apart, 
detects the ideal in the real, and, like a golden sun- 
set on the smoke-cloud of a city, glorifies the very 
soil of earth with heavenly light. We are convinced 
that to some want of fulness in this department of 
our author's mind must be attributed many of the 
most questionable sentiments characteristic of his 



228 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

book; — especially his impatience at the historical 
details of the life of Christ, and his eagerness to 
hide the mysterious Jesus behind the clouds of heav- 
en. Describing his impressions on first making the 
acquaintance of a Unitarian, he says : — 

" I now discovered that there was a deeper distaste in me 
for the details of the human life of Christ than I was pre- 
viously conscious of ; a distaste which I found out by a re- 
action from the minute interest felt in such details by my 
new friend. For several years more, I did not fully under- 
stand how and why this was ; viz. that my religion had al- 
ways been Pauline. Christ was to me the ideal of glorified 
human nature, but I needed some dimness in the portrait to 
give play to my imagination : if drawn too sharply histori- 
cal, it sank into commonplace and caused a revulsion of 
feeling. As all paintings of the miraculous used to dis- 
please and even disgust me from a boy by the unbelief 
which they inspired ; so if any one dwelt on the special 
proofs of tenderness and love exhibited in certain words or 
actions of Jesus, it was apt to call out in me a sense, that 
from day to day equal kindness might often be met. The 
imbecility of preachers, who would dwell on such words as 
c Weep not,' as if nobody else ever uttered such, has al- 
ways annoyed me. I felt it impossible to obtain a worthy 
idea of Christ from studying any of the details reported 
concerning him. If I dwelt too much on these, I got a 
finite object; but I yearned for an infinite one : hence my 
preference for John's mysterious Jesus." — p. 102. 

We are far from asserting that the Unitarians are 
a peculiarly imaginative people : and the disposi- 
tion, criticized by our author, to magnify small and 
inexpressive traits, is a sure indication of defect in 



PHASES OF FAITH. 229 

that feeling of proportion which imagination always 
involves. But the tendency to unbelief in looking 
at pictorial representations of miracle ; the inability 
to find an ideal unity in the real Jesus of Nazareth, 
or to see in that gracious and majestic form the spir- 
itual glory for which the heart craves ; and the ap- 
parent admission that any thing realized, any thing 
"too sharply historical," thereby must "sink into 
commonplace and cause a revulsion of feeling " ; 
appear to us curiously to illustrate the un-idealizing 
character of the Evangelical mind, and its tendency 
to run into romance. We have not hesitated to 
dwell on the distinct mental bases of the rival sys- 
tems of religion, because, without reference to them, 
many of the experiences recorded in this volume can 
scarcely be interpreted, or its conclusions estimated 
aright. If the subject has brought us too near to per- 
sonal criticism, our apology must be, that, where 
great questions of faith are discussed in the form of 
self-revelations from an individual mind, the idiosyn- 
crasy of the narrator is necessarily drawn in among 
the elements of the argument. 

The close of his Oxford course left Mr. Newman 
fresh from the impression of Paley's Horse Paulinse, 
— an enthusiastical and somewhat exclusive disciple 
of the Pauline Christianity. He was thus prepared, 
on his removal to a tutorship in Wicklow,to fall un- 
der the powerful influence of a devoted Evangelical 
missionary, of whom, under the designation of "the 
Irish Clergyman," a striking picture is presented. 
Negligent of his person, careless of his health, cast- 
ing down in service of the cross the wealth of intel- 
20 



230 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

lect and culture, this crippled devotee acquired, by- 
force of will and high faithfulness of life, an ascen- 
dency, like that of an apostle, over our author's 
mind. As the theory of this saintly man led him to 
scorn every pursuit that withdrew him from prayer 
and missionary toil, and to discard every book ex- 
cept the Bible, so, by the exercise of voluntary pov- 
erty and an unsparing self-sacrifice to the spiritual 
interests of the peasantry, did his practice severely 
realize his belief. It was doubtless this solid and ab- 
solute sincerity which led captive a soul like Mr. 
Newman's, — so profoundly truth-loving, yet at that 
time tremulous perhaps with the consciousness of 
intellectual tastes and social interests at variance 
with the spiritual concentration required by his 
creed. The overpowering impression of this new 
friend's character at once inspired him with a wish 
to engage in a mission to the heathen, and deepened 
in his mind the conviction, that the great instrument 
of conversion must be sought, not in conclusive 
arguments, but in persuasive lives; that the criti- 
cal and learned evidences on which the miraculous 
claims of Christianity are made to rest are too 
unwieldy to be generally efficacious; and that the 
moral appeal of the Gospel to the conscience must 
be the main reliance for evangelizing the world. To 
embody this appeal in an actual church or fraternity 
planted upon Pagan soil, and silently appearing 
there in all the expressiveness of Christian purity, 
patience, and loving self-denial, became our author's 
single desire : and in 1830 he went out to Bagdad 
to join himself to a community of Evangelical emi- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 231 

grants already established there with similar views 
under the influence of Mr. Groves. During a two 
years' residence in Persia began the series of corro- 
sions upon the strict orthodoxy of his creed, under 
which, after another period, the whole system of Cal- 
vinism collapsed. The logical activity of his intel- 
lect worked, for the present, entirely within the limits 
of the Evangelical scheme, and in complete submis- 
sion to the letter of Scripture. The first weakness 
detected — the only one during absence in the East 
— affected the doctrine of the Trinity. He found it 
impossible to reconcile the manifest subordination of 
the Son to the Father in the theology of Paul and 
John with the definitions of the Athanasian Creed. 
The considerations and the texts which forced this 
conviction upon him, like most of the trains of 
thought by which he passed to ulterior results, are 
familiar to all who have any acquaintance with the 
Unitarian controversy, and need not be presented 
here. Our author rested for a while in the Nicene 
doctrine of the derived nature of the Son, yet his 
homogeneity with the Father. "While this dogmatic 
direction was prominently engaging his attention, it 
is plain that an under-current of thought, charged 
with most momentous tendencies, was already in 
motion ; — a course of reflection on the logic of relig- 
ious evidence, and the unmanageable nature of ex- 
ternal proof in relation to spiritual truth. The fol- 
lowing incident is rich in suggestion : — 

" While we were at Aleppo, I one day got into religious 
discourse with a Mohammedan carpenter, which left on 
me a lasting impression. Among other matters, I was pe- 



232 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

culiarly desirous of disabusing him of the current notion of 
his people, that our Gospels are spurious narratives of late 
date. I found great difficulty of expression ; but the man 
listened to me with much attention, and I was encouraged 
to exert myself. He waited patiently till I had done, and 
then spoke to the following effect : — 'I will tell you, Sir, 
how the case stands. God has given to you English a 
great many good gifts. You make fine ships and sharp pen- 
knives, and good cloth and cottons, and you have rich no- 
bles and brave soldiers ; and you write and print many 
learned books (dictionaries and grammars) : all this is of 
God. But there is one thing that God has withheld from 
you, and has revealed to us ; and that is, the knowledge 
of the true religion, by which one may be saved.' When 
he thus ignored my argument (which was probably quite 
unintelligible to him), and delivered his simple protest, I 
was silenced, and at the same time amused. But the more 
I thought it over, the more instruction I saw in the case. 
His position towards me was exactly that of a humble 
Christian towards an unbelieving philosopher ; nay, that of 
the early Apostles or Jewish prophets towards the proud, 
cultivated, wordly-wise, and powerful heathen. This not 
only showed the vanity of any argument to him, except 
one purely addressed to his moral and spiritual faculties ; 
but it also indicated to me that ignorance has its spiritual 
self-sufficiency as well as erudition ; and that if there is a 
Pride of Reason, so is there a Pride of Unreason. But 
though this rested in my memory, it was not long before I 
worked out all the results of that thought." — p. 52. 

The love among saintly hearts is deep : but in the 
same proportion their jealousy is quick. No detect- 
ive police has a vigilance so keen as the instinct of or- 
thodoxy. On Mr. Newman's returning to England 



PHASES OF FAITH. 233 

in hope of swelling the numbers of the Persian Mis- 
sion, he had not performed his quarantine on board 
the ship before he found that rumors of his unsound- 
ness in the faith had preceded him. The usual re- 
sults followed: for in these cases, where there is 
nothing to be forgiven, Christians never forgive. 
Having spoken at some religious meetings, — unor- 
dained as he was, — he was cut off by his brother. 
Writing to the Irish clergyman to acknowledge his 
Nicene tendency, and to ask for an Athanasian ex- 
planation of the text, " To us there is but one God, 
the Father," — he was peremptorily, and on pain of 
alienated friendship, desired to confess that "the 
Father " meant « the Trinity." 

" The Father meant the Trinity ! ! For the first time 
I perceived, that so vehement a champion of the suffi- 
ciency of the Scripture, so stanch an opposer of Creeds and 
Churches, was wedded to an extra- Scriptural creed of his 
own, by which he tested the spiritual state of his brethren. 
I was in despair, and like a man thunderstruck. I had 
nothing more to say. Two more letters from the same 
hand I saw, the latter of which was to threaten some new 
acquaintances who were kind to me, (persons wholly un- 
known to him,) that, if they did not desist from sheltering 
me, and break off intercourse, they should, as far as his in- 
fluence went, themselves everywhere be cut off from Chris- 
tian communion and recognition. This will suffice to in- 
dicate the sort of social persecution through which, after 
a succession of struggles, I found myself separated from 
persons whom I had trustingly admired, and on whom I had 
most counted for union : with whom I fondly believed my- 
self bound up for eternity ; of whom some were my previ- 
ously intimate friends, while for others, even on slight ac- 
20* 



234 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

quaintance, I would have performed menial offices, and 
thought myself honored ; whom I still looked upon as the 
blessed and excellent of the earth, and the special favor- 
ites of Heaven ; whose company (though oftentimes they 
were considerably my inferiors either in rank or in knowl- 
edge and cultivation) I would have chosen in preference to 
that of nobles ; whom I loved solely because I thought 
them to love God, and of whom I asked nothing, but that 
they would admit me as the meanest and most frail of dis- 
ciples. My heart was ready to break : I wished for a 
woman's soul, that I might weep in floods. O Dogma ! 
Dogma ! how dost thou trample under foot love, truth, con- 
science, justice ! Was ever a Moloch worse than thou ? 
Burn me at the stake ; then Christ will receive me, and 
saints beyond the grave will love me, though the saints here 
know me not. But now I am alone in the world ; I can trust 
no one. The new acquaintances who barely tolerated me, 
and old friends whom reports have not reached (if such 
there be), may turn against me with animosity to-morrow, 
as those have done from whom I could least have imagined 
it. Where is union ? Where is the Church which was to 
convert the heathen ?" — p. 58. 

So bitter an experience cannot befall a sensitive 
and trusting soul, without driving it with sadness 
in upon itself, and shutting it up in a kind of lonely 
love, amid the sufficing sympathy of God. A heart 
of noble faith cannot, indeed, like the worldly who 
have nothing in them that will keep, be soured by 
such disappointment ; and will even turn into a fruit- 
ful sorrow what to the others is an acrid poison eat- 
ing to the very pith of life. But still, cruelty and 
injustice cannot go for nothing, or, by the miraculous 
touch of ever so divine a spirit, be transmuted into 



PHASES OF FAITH. 235 

only good. And there is a religious type of the un- 
happy influence produced by mortified hope, — a res- 
olute isolation of soul, lofty towards men, that its 
tenderness may be reserved entire for God; — a jeal- 
ous zeal against the idols of the mind ; — and too 
quick an apprehension of thraldom from every affec- 
tion that comes with offers of mediation between 
earth and heaven. Some traces of such a mood we 
do think apparent in Mr. Newman's later course of 
thought, — an excessive resolve not to be imposed 
upon by conventional or got-up feelings, — a prosaic, 
not to say embittered, estimate of human nature, — 
and a slowness to lay the heart freely open to rev- 
erential admiration. If it be so, it is but too high- 
strained a faithfulness to this noble vow and sweet 
submission : — 

" The resolution then rose within me, to love all good 
men from a distance, but never again to count on perma- 
nent friendship with any one who was not himself cast out 
as a heretic. Nor, in fact, did the storm of distress which 
these events inflicted on me subside, until I willingly re- 
ceived the task of withstanding it as God's trial whether I 
was faithful. As soon as I gained strength to say, ' O my 
Lord, I will bear not this only, hut more also, for thy sake, 
for conscience, and for truth,' — my sorrows vanished until 
the next blow and the next inevitable pang. At last my 
heart had died within me, the bitterness of death was past. 
I was satisfied to be hated by the saints, and to reckon that 
those who had not yet turned against me would not bear 
me much longer. Then I conceived the belief, that, if we 
may not make a heaven on earth for ourselves out of the 
love of saints, it is in order that we may find a truer heaven 
in God's love." — p. 63. 



236 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

The consciousness of unjust treatment had the 
salutary effect of raising in our author's esteem the 
simple virtues of the good natural heart ; the kindly- 
presence of which would have protected him against 
the social persecution brought to bear upon him. 
He knew that the friends who were casting him off 
were persons of deeply devout minds. He knew 
that they did him cruel wrong. And this combina- 
tion forced upon him the certainty, " that spirituality 
is no adequate security for sound moral discernment." 
A kindlier disposition grew up towards the common 
world of men, in whom the moral sentiments had not 
exalted themselves into religion: and a course of 
new thought arose, merging at last in the perception 
that Religion is but the culminating meridian of 
Morals, and God approachable only by the aim at 
infinite excellence. It was plain, too, that those who 
did violence to their amiable nature in fancied obe- 
dience to the requirements of the Bible, easily fell 
into crooked and narrow ways : so that, be the Scrip- 
ture rule ever so unerring, it needs either an infalli- 
ble guide, or a right mind, to interpret and apply it. 
No inroad, however, had yet been made upon our 
author's reliance on the sacred writings, as oracles 
of supreme and perfect truth ; or upon any portion 
of Calvinistic economy of salvation. The new force 
given to the moral sentiments revived an old aver- 
sion to the doctrine of reprobation, and rendered him 
so dissatisfied with the appeal to Sovereign Might 
in answer to objections springing from the sense of 
justice, that even Paul's authority, " Nay, but, O 
man, who art thou that repliest against God?" 



PHASES OF FAITH. 237 

could not stifle his repugnance. In an understand- 
ing thus disposed, in which Arbitrary and Infinite 
Will has ceased to afford a solid basis, it is plain 
that the whole Genevan system is undermined ; and 
accordingly it rapidly became a mass of ruins. First, 
some stealthy glances at (we presume) Dr. South- 
wood Smith's Treatise on the Divine Government, 
in the library of an orthodox friend, opened up the 
question of eternal punishment: and the doctrine 
was discarded on grounds both critical and moral. 
Next, the Deity of Christ was lowered another step, 
from the consideration that a derived being must be 
derived in time, and cannot be co-eternal with his 
Source: and then another step again, in order to 
save some doctrine of Atonement, and obtain a dead 
Christ on Calvary, — which could not be if his na- 
ture were beyond the Arian measure. Finally, the 
entailment of moral corruption on the posterity of 
Adam is discovered to be without support from 
Scripture, and intrinsically absurd: and the deprav- 
ity of human nature is reduced to the historically 
attested fact of wide-spread moral evil. Upon all 
these topics the narrative abounds with terse and 
animated reasonings. Their freshness, however, is 
mainly due to the directness with which they proceed 
from the independent action of our author's mind. 
In themselves they are not new to persons so far 
gone in heresy as our readers are likely to be : and 
we quit this part of our work with one citation. It 
contains an important testimony on behalf of an 
opinion, exceedingly startling to Unitarians, but, as 
we have long been convinced, radically sound. Mr. 



238 



MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 



Newman is speaking of his state of mind when he 
had resolved the riddle of the Trinity, and become — 
in worship — Unitarian : — 

" After all, could I seriously think, that morally and spir- 
itually I was either better or worse for this discovery ? I 
could not pretend that I was. 

" This showed me that, if a man of partially unsound and 
visionary mind made the angel Gabriel a fourth person in 
the Godhead, it might cause no difference whatever in the 
actings of his spirit. The great question would be, whether 
he ascribed the same moral perfection to Gabriel as to the 
Father. If so, to worship him would be no degradation to 
the soul ; even if absolute omnipotence were not attributed, 
nay, nor a past eternal existence. It thus became clear 
to me, that Polytheism, as such, is not a moral and spiritual, 
but at most only an intellectual error : and that its practical 
evil consists in worshipping beings whom we represent to our 
imaginations as morally imperfect. Conversely, one who 
imputes to God sentiments and conduct which in man he 
would call capricious or cruel, such a one, even if he be as 
Monotheistic as a Mussulman, admits into his soul the whole 
virus of Idolatry." — p. 89. 

This crisis in Mr. Newman's course of thought, 
when his orthodoxy was gone, but his faith in the 
authority of Scripture remained intact, was highly 
favorable for his introduction to the Unitarian con- 
ception of Christianity : and it so happened that just 
then he made the acquaintance of a professor of 
that faith, evidently qualified, by tenderness and 
piety of spirit, as well as by familiarity with the 
theology of his church, to represent the system in 
its most attractive form. It had, how T ever, no charm 



PHASES OF FAITH. 239 

for our author, whose training had been too exclu- 
sively Pauline to remove its Holy of Holies into the 
Gospels; who could not take up with the Judaical 
Messiah of Matthew, especially with the loss of the 
first chapters, by which alone the human Jesus could 
show title to be Lord of the living and the dead, 
and competency to stand forth as the moral image 
of God. So he passed this sect by, and pursued his 
way ; taking up now a new set of researches : no 
longer trying dogmas by the test of Scripture; but 
trying Scripture by the test of History, Science, 
Criticism, and all the relevant fixed points in human 
knowledge. The question has long been struggling 
for attention in his mind, what was the just bounda- 
ry between the authority of the letter and the rights 
of the spirit, — between revealed and natural relig- 
ion. The principle on which, while yet a student, 
he had provisionally decided it, is the only one of 
which the case admits: he had consulted the compe- 
tency of the human reason and conscience in mat- 
ters of religion ; and only beyond the limits of that 
competency had allowed miraculous attestation to 
possess oracular rights. In the application of this 
principle, however, lay the real difficulty: and here, 
as he freely allows, he had fallen into some vacilla- 
tion and inconsistency. As the process of Evangel- 
ical conversion begins with appealing to the sense of 
sin, and relies on the fears and despair incident to 
conscious alienation from God, his creed had obliged 
him to assume, among the data of the natural mind, 
a perception of right and wrong, a knowledge of 
God as Holy, and an anticipation of retributive jus- 



240 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

tice. From this it would seem irresistibly to follow, 
that the whole of the moral elements of religion are 
within the reach of the human apprehension : for 
the consciousness which reports to us our alienation 
cannot be insensible to its removal : and if in the 
one case it forecasts the shadow of penal suffering, 
it cannot but throw forward in the other the promis- 
sory light of immortal joy. Yet this brighter half of 
the truth, — comprising the scheme of human recov- 
ery, — Mr. Newman had set down as beyond the 
ken of all our faculties; regarding the Atonement, 
the Reconciliation, and the Life Eternal, as outward 
facts of the supernatural kind, cognizable only by 
miraculous media of attestation. The two lists of 
truths, professedly separated from each other as re- 
spectively internal and external, — subjective condi- 
tions and objective facts, — by no means answer to 
this classification. The peace and hope of a recon- 
ciled mind are as truly matters of spiritual expe- 
rience as the fever and terror of guilt: and on the 
other hand, the existence and Providence of God 
are no less objective facts than the life after death. 
Moreover, while in theory the only function reserved 
for revelation was the communication of " external 
truths," — the internal and spiritual being left to na- 
ture, — the main practical reason for clinging to the 
miraculous had been a distrust of the depraved mor- 
al perceptions of man. Thus they are first set up as 
our sole reporters of internal truths, and then put 
down as untrustworthy : and, to check and correct 
them, we are referred to an informant whose cogni- 
zance is limited to the external. Whether some 



PHASES OF FAITH. 241 

lingering traces of this logical confusion, which be- 
sets almost every scheme of Christian Evidences, 
may not even yet be found in our author's creed, we 
will not here pause to decide. For some time it 
continued to entangle him. The habit of distrust- 
ing the moral judgment, and of placing strong con- 
fidence in the results of inductive science and histor- 
ical criticism, led him to test the infallibility of 
Scripture, in the first instance, by its verdict on 
matters clearly within the range of the common un- 
derstanding, — of Geography, Physiology, Natural 
History, Language, &c. For one prepossessed with 
the demand for an unerring record, — one whose 
early faith had taken into its very essence the myths 
of Genesis, no less than the story of Gethsemane, 
— one who, under guidance of the systematizing 
Paul, had worked his way back with one idea 
through all providential history from the Ascension 
to the Creation, and who expected, on retracing his 
steps, to find it all a drama, with the opening in Eden, 
the development among the prophets, and the catas- 
trophe on Calvary ; it is easy to foresee the result. 
Bibliolatry was replaced by Iconoclasm : and the 
Scriptures lost by degrees, not simply their super- 
natural authority, but their natural credit. The 
course of discovery was so little different from the 
usual one, that it is needless to dwell upon it in de- 
tail. Beginning with the genealogies in Matthew 
and Luke, so evidently faulty and irreconcilable in 
their contents, and inconclusive in result, Mr. New- 
man soon found that no such thing as a harmony of 
the Gospels could be made, and that they must be 
21 



242 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

severally treated (the first three constituting practi- 
cally only one) as human and fallible records. The 
same criticism, when applied to the Old Testament, 
invalidated the legends of the Fall and the Deluge, 
and brought to light the composite structure of the 
Pentateuch, out of various preexisting materials. 
The direct sanction of Jehovah to the iniquities of 
early Israelitish history is found to be too distinctly 
claimed to be explained away by any theory of de- 
velopment or accommodation. The demonology of 
the first three Gospels seems so completely an inte- 
gral and even a principal part of their evidence for 
the Messiahship, that the misconceptions involved 
in it affect, in our author's estimation, their whole 
case, and destroy all confidence in their narrations. 
One reliance after another thus giving way, he rests 
for a while on a consolatory suggestion of Dr. Ar- 
nold's, — that the Gospel of John stands alone and 
unassailable among the materials of primitive Chris- 
tian history. The sober-minded Paul, too, had borne 
his witness to the risen Christ ; and Peter had re- 
ferred to the Transfiguration. Not even this narrow 
footing retains its firmness long. Without pronoun- 
cing against the authenticity of the fourth Gospel, 
Mr. Newman is so much impressed with the coloring 
evidently thrown over all its contents by the author's 
own mind, as well as by the negative evidence 
against the public and stupendous miracles which, 
half a century after their alleged occurrence, he ex- 
clusively reports, that he renounces the book as un- 
historical. There remains, however, the dear and 
venerated Paul. Alas ! he descants upon the gift of 



PHASES OF FAITH. 243 

tongues ! and our author, having fallen in the way 
of the Irvingite pretensions to this endowment, had 
learned at once to despise it, and to believe it iden- 
tical in London with the apostolic phenomena at 
Corinth. This, with the good apostle's easy faith in 
trance or vision, betrays such eccentric notions of 
the logic of evidence, that no high estimate can be 
made of his testimony to the resurrection. He held 
himself indeed somewhat proudly independent of all 
natural sources of information respecting Christ, 
and declared his Gospel to be a separate and person- 
al revelation. Unless we know something of the 
process which Paul interpreted into divine communi- 
cation, and could assure ourselves that it was not 
wholly subjective, we should not be justified in ac- 
cepting objective history on his word. So the Apos- 
tle of the Gentiles, revered for his spiritual great- 
ness, is allowed, as a witness, to pass dishonored 
away. One only hope yet remained. The main 
and central personage might be divine, though inac- 
cessible through the unskilful reports of companions 
and followers. There was a message worthy of God 
to send, and, if the intended object of faith at all, 
needful for man thus to receive, — the tidings of an 
immortal life : perhaps, after all, Jesus was invested 
with the Messiahship to be the bearer of this truth. 
"Was he then the Messiah? — For an answer to this 
question we need not depend entirely on the evan- 
gelical records. "We know in outline both the histo- 
ry of the Founder of Christianity, and the course 
run by his Religion. We know also whence the pic- 
ture is drawn of the Ideal Personage fore-announced 



244 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

as the Messiah. By comparing the preconception 
with the facts, we can pronounce whether a realiza- 
tion has taken place. Mr. Newman's examination 
dissipates the Messianic prophecies altogether; and 
he concludes that the last claim on behalf of Jesus 
vanishes with them. Finally, he digresses into, a 
collateral discussion of the claims of Christianity on 
the gratitude of mankind for its beneficent influence 
on civilization : and he gives it as his judgment, that 
neither the woman nor the slave has any clear rea- 
son for looking on the Gospel as an emancipating 
agency : and that we owe the Reformation less to 
the disinterred Scriptures and the energies of Luther, 
than to the Heathen moralists and the revival of let- 
ters. Thus, with relentless perseverance, does our 
author wage war with every objective support of 
Religion, and not rest till, by sweeping off every me- 
dium, he has left a clear space between the individ- 
ual soul and God. That, with one so rich in devout 
and lofty sentiment, this may all take place, and 
cause " no convulsion of mind, no emptiness of soul, 
no inward practical change," we fully believe; we 
think the time is come when the whole series of ex- 
ternal questions noticed by Mr. Newman should be 
discussed without expressions of holy horror, as if 
the ultimate essence of religion were profanely 
touched : and ere we proceed to declare our strong 
dissent from the most important of the author's neg- 
ative conclusions, we desire to accept, upon his own 
terms, the claim of spiritual fellowship preferred in 
these admirable sentences : — 

" I know that many Evangelicals will reply, that I never 



PHASES OF FAITH. 245 

can have had c the true ' faith ; else I could never have lost 
it : and as for my not being conscious of spiritual change, 
they will accept this as confirming their assertion. Un- 
doubtedly I cannot prove that I ever felt as they now feel. 
Perhaps they love their present opinions more than truth, 
and are careless to examine and verify them : with that I 
claim no fellowship. But there are Christians of another 
stamp, who love their creed only because they believe it to 
be true, but love truth, as such, and truthfulness, more than 
any creed : with these I claim fellowship. Their love to 
God and man, their allegiance to righteousness and true ho- 
liness, will not be in suspense, and liable to be overturned 
by new discoveries in geology and in ancient inscriptions, 
or by improved criticisms of texts and of history ; nor have 
they any imaginable interest in thwarting the advance of 
scholarship. It is strange indeed to undervalue that Faith, 
which alone is purely moral and spiritual, alone rests on a 
basis that cannot be shaken, alone lifts the possessor above 
the conflicts of erudition, and makes it impossible for him to 
fear the increase of knowledge." — p. 201. 

When we say that with by far the greater part of 
Mr. Newman's criticism on the Old Testament we 
are disposed to agree, and that we would by no 
means ask equal and indiscriminate admission for 
all the contents of the New, it will be plain that we 
are no Bibliolaters. But in simple obedience to the 
feeling of literary justice, we must profess our opin- 
ion, that the primitive Christian records do not re- 
ceive fair treatment at his hands. The flaws which 
he enumerates, even if all admitted to be there, 
would not invalidate the large masses of history 
which he treats as worthless on their account : nor 
is it well to throw away wholesale such fruits of a 
21* 



246 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

tree of life, — reproductive seed and all, — in offence 
at the spots upon the skin. Whether, when the ne- 
cessary deductions have been made, what remains be 
worth preserving, — whether it be essence or only- 
accident, — must certainly depend on our precon- 
ception of what we have a right to expect from the 
document. If we must find evidence enough to 
prove the book an oracle, and to establish all the 
sentiments, precepts, and beliefs therein attributed 
even to its chief personage in the place of obligatory 
rules or incontrovertible truths, we freely own that 
the enterprise is hopeless. But that Revelation can 
be made only in the shape of orders imposed upon 
the will, or information communicated to the under- 
standing, is a postulate which we cannot allow. 
God may speak to us, — in preternatural as in nat- 
ural providence, — through our moral perceptions 
and affections, — according to the manner of Art, by 
creation of spiritual Beauty, rather than after the 
type of Science, by logical delivery of truth. In this 
case, all that can be required of the vehicle is, that 
it be an adequate and preservative frame-work for 
the Divine image presented before the human soul. 
In the Gospels, taken with relation to the Pauline 
writings, this requisition appears to us fully met. 
Whatever uncertainty there may be, in this or that 
detail, as to what Christ did, there is surely no rea- 
sonable doubt as to what he was : and if this be left, 
then, so far from all being lost, the essential power 
of the Christian religion is permanently safe. To 
our author's strictures on this conception of Chris- 
tianity we shall hereafter advert : at present we post- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 247 

pone the dogmatic to the Biblical question, whether 
in the Evangelists' writings we possess an authentic 
and divine picture of character. The tendency of 
Mr. Newman's mind to external observation is so 
strong, that he rarely resorts to the higher moral crit- 
icism which affects this point. While he repeatedly 
intimates his opinion that the reverential estimate of 
the character of Christ is a baseless exaggeration, 
we remember only two direct apologies for this opin- 
ion. The first is stated in the following passage, 
where, after justly vindicating the position, that mir- 
acles cannot turn aside the common laws of moral- 
ity, he adds, — 

" But if only a small immorality is concerned, shall we 
then say that a miracle may justify it ? Could it author- 
ize me to plait a whip of small cords, and flog a preferment- 
hunter out of the pulpit ? or would it justify me in publicly 
calling the Queen and her Ministers c a brood of vipers, who 
cannot escape the damnation of hell ' ? Such questions go 
very deep into the heart of the Christian claims." — p. 151. 

The cleansing of the Temple " a small immoral- 
ity " ! an offence against politeness ! Yes : the pro- 
phetic spirit is sometimes oblivious of the rules of 
the drawing-room : and inspired Conscience, like the 
inspiring God, seeing a hypocrite, will take the lib- 
erty to say so, and to act accordingly. Are the su- 
perficial amenities, the soothing fictions, the smoth- 
erings of the burning heart, needful for the common 
usages of civilization and the comfortable intercourse 
of equals, really paramount in this world, and never 
to give way ? and when a soul of power, unable to 
refrain, rubs off, though it be with rasping words, all 



248 MARTINEATJ'S MISCELLANIES. 

the varnish from rottenness and lies, is he to be tried 
in our courts of compliment for a misdemeanor? Is 
there never a duty higher than that of either pitying 
or converting guilty men, — the duty of publicly ex- 
posing them ? of awakening the popular conscience, 
and sweeping away the conventional timidities, for 
a severe return to truth and reality? No rule of 
morals can be recognized as just, which prohibits 
conformity of human speech to fact, and insists on 
terms of civility being kept with all manner of in- 
iquity. Offensive as may be the expression " brood 
of vipers," it is hardly so offensive as the thing-; and 
when corrupt and venomous times have not only 
generated it, but brought it to coil around the altar, 
and hinder the approach of hearts too pure to wor- 
ship it, can any law of God forbid to crush it with 
the heel of scorn ? There are crises in human af- 
fairs, when the sympathies of noble minds, like par- 
ties in a convulsed and struggling nation, cannot 
avoid vehement contrast and disruption ; when com- 
passion for a deluded people involves open denun- 
ciation of the deceivers who ought to be the guides ; 
and when scalding invective — the ultima ratio of 
speech — becomes as much a necessity of justice 
and as little a violation of any worthy love, as an 
appeal to the sword by the redeemers of an injured 
Commonwealth. The presumed analogy between 
Mr. Newman's infliction of personal castigation on 
a clergyman in the pulpit and Christ's act in driving 
the sheep and oxen from the Temple courts is not 
fortunate. Indeed, we must say, in reference to this 
whole stricture, that Criticism, in its lashing moods, 



PHASES OF FAITH. 249 

has seldom, in our opinion, plaited a whip of smaller 
cords. 

The other moral charge against the Author of 
Christianity is rather implied than directly stated, 
and is necessarily mixed up with other considera- 
tions not properly moral. He gave himself out as 
the Messiah ; and he was evidently not Messiah : he 
must have been conscious of his inability to support 
the character; yet to the last he refused to quit the 
pretension. Now we admit, in a certain sense, every 
one of these propositions : yet maintain that they 
establish no point whatsoever against the perfect 
truth and sanctity of Christ. This statement will 
cease to appear paradoxical, when due allowance is 
made for the vague and ambiguous meaning of the 
word " Messiah" It is needless to say, that this 
term denotes no real object in rerum natura y but a 
wholly ideal personage, the arbitrary product of Jew- 
ish imagination. As in all such cases of mental cre- 
ation, the attributes assigned to him, being free 
from all restraint of fact, were exceedingly numerous 
and indeterminate, — involving features personal, 
political, and religious : nor was the type so rigor- 
ously fixed as not to yield, with adequate pliancy, to 
the plastic pressure of each believer's individual tem- 
perament and thought. The Messianic character- 
istics needed to satisfy the compilers of the first 
three Gospels were different from those demanded 
by the writer of the fourth ; and yet another set were 
requisite for Paul. How are we to apply a concep- 
tion so shifting as a criterion of the reality of a di- 
vine mission, and of the sincerity of one professing 



250 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

to be charged with it ? It would be easy, in every 
imaginable case, to find out attributes in the national 
preconception, which would be missing in the indi- 
vidual realization; the concrete combination of all 
being simply impossible. True it is, that, converse- 
ly, the cases were proportionably frequent in which 
some features were sufficiently present to allow of 
plausible pretensions to the character. But this only 
proves how unfit is an ideal image like this to serve 
as a test of spiritual claims. What are the decisive 
marks which are indispensable to the assertor of 
Messiahship? Mr. Newman seeks them in the He- 
brew prophecies which furnished the first lineaments 
of the conception : and protests that to these repre- 
sentations there is little in Jesus which truly corre- 
sponds. But does he forget that, in trying the pre- 
tensions of Isaiah and the Hebrew bards, he had al- 
ready condemned these very passages as empty of 
all prediction, and justifying no such expectation as 
was afterwards based upon them ? He thus with- 
draws the national ideal from the Old Testament; 
and then puts it in again for the refutation of the 
Christian claims : and makes it a charge against Je- 
sus, that he did not realize certain non-existent proph- 
ecies. The discrepancy between the historical pic- 
ture in the New Testament and the pseudo-prophet- 
ic in the Old, might reasonably be urged by a Jew ; 
but to Mr. Newman it should rather afford an evi- 
dence that the Evangelical narrative is a sketch from 
the life, and not a mythical fancy-piece imitated 
from David and Isaiah. No doubt Jesus, by the 
very act of appealing to the Hebrew Scriptures, as- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 251 

sumes their Messianic import, and so betrays his 
participation in the common misconstruction of their 
meaning. But this implies no more than such falli- 
bility in matters of intellectual and literary estimate, 
as every theory must allow which leaves to the in- 
spired prophet any human faculties at all, or any 
means of contact with the mind of his age and na- 
tion. Inspiration in matters of textual criticism and 
exegesis can be demanded only by a theology be- 
neath contempt; and least of all by our author, who 
so widely separates the functions of the intellect and 
the soul, and protests against all qualifying of spirit- 
ual perceptions by learned judgments. No moral 
charge is established, until it is shown, that, in ap- 
plying the old prophecies to himself, Jesus was con- 
scions that they did not fit. This, however, is not 
shown and cannot be shown. The absence in him 
of some of the prophetic lineaments was so compen- 
sated by the intensity of others, that no suspicion 
can be thrown upon the purity and sincerity of his 
claim ; especially as it was in the accidents of exter- 
nal power that he was wanting, and in the essence 
of spiritual light that he abounded. He claimed to 
be " Messiah," it is said ; and " Messiah he was notP 
True ; and if he was less than this, we can reverence 
him no longer. But if he was more, only could find 
no other language than the Messianic in which to 
interpret to himself and others the feeling of his Di- 
vine call, then was the national formula the mere 
vehicle furnished by history for an essential fact, the 
modest costume disguising a divine reality : and the 
only error in the account which Christ gives of him- 



252 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

self lies in its affirming far less than the truth. In 
the theocratic faith which occupied Palestine, two 
distinct elements coexisted, — the political and the 
religious : the former promising external glories ac- 
cording to the type, but transcending the limits, of 
the united monarchy ; the latter intent upon the re- 
alization of a spiritual Ideal, including the restora- 
tion of pure worship and the establishment of men 
in a saintly fraternity in immediate communion 
W T ith Heaven. As the first of these elements sup- 
plied natural materials to the ambition and vanity of 
pretenders, so did the second offer a receptacle to 
which the holiest mind and the highest inspiration 
would not shrink from resorting. So was it, as we 
believe, with Christ. The political functions of 
Messiah he never positively denied, or absolutely 
cleared out from his mere speculative representa- 
tions of the future. But an infallible moral percep- 
tion, and affections spiritually preoccupied, detained 
him from every tendency to realize them ; made him 
regard their practical occurrence to his mind as a di- 
abolical Temptation; and drove him into mountain 
solitudes, when eager multitudes would set him up 
for king. Whether, according to the account in the 
first three Gospels, he dealt with the political part of 
the Messianic scheme, when it obtruded itself, by 
putting it off into the future; or whether, according 
to John, he got rid of it by melting it absolutely and 
immediately away in the spiritual ; either method is 
so true to the instinct of a mind too clear and holy 
to touch what it is not sceptical enough to disbelieve, 
that we wonder at the preference shown for the vul- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 253 

gar imputation, — "Depend upon it, Jesus would 
have raised an army if he could ; and only talked 
about religion, because there was nothing else that 
he could do." 

The fact to which we have adverted, — the in- 
vestiture of a spiritual mission with a Messianic 
form, — explains a phenomenon in John's Gospel to 
which Mr. Newman applies (p. 146) some severe 
criticisms. That Gospel betrays great vacillation in 
its estimate of the logical value of miracles : repre- 
senting Christ sometimes as reproving the demand 
for a miracle, and blessing those whose faith can 
dispense with such support ; sometimes as appealing 
to miracle as a just basis for belief. The fact of 
this mixed appeal is indisputable : and to us it seems 
in every way suitable to the mixed character sus- 
tained by Jesus, as human or universal prophet, and 
as national Messiah. The miracles to which he ap- 
peals were regarded as the proper signs of theocratic 
power ; the faith without miracle was the just de- 
mand he made on the spiritual sympathies of good 
hearts. They were severally insisted on in behalf 
of different positions : the one to prove his Jewish 
Messiahship ; the other, his insight into Divine things 
hidden from the possible apprehension of no pure 
soul. In the latter, we are concerned with the per- 
manent life of Christianity ; in the former, with its 
mere door of entrance upon the theatre of human 
affairs. 

The absence of this distinction appears to us a 
frequent cause of unconscious unfairness in Mr. 
Newman's strictures. The rules of estimate which 
22 



254 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

you would apply to a philosophical system are very 
different from those by which you appreciate an his- 
torical development : — in the one case, they are a&- 
solute, furnished by your conceptions of what is 
abstractedly true in itself; in the other, they are 
relative, and have regard to actual human condi- 
tions, admitting or excluding what was better or 
worse. In a philosophical theory, every blemish and 
omission is justly held to detract from its merits : 
but in an historical development, such imperfections 
may be due, not to the new, but to the old, — to the 
irremovable data of feeling and belief which the 
young agency finds in occupation of the field given 
for its work. This difference is not annihilated, 
when we have to do with supernatural instead of 
natural affairs. Revelation may assume the form 
either of a divine philosophy, professing to furnish 
unconditioned truth; or of a divine influence cast 
into the midst of the world's development, and 
weaving a pattern of more than human art and 
beauty into the texture of history. It is in the for- 
mer aspect that our author contemplates the religion 
of Christendom ; and he is thus led to charge upon 
it many things that cannot justly be laid to its ac- 
count. Christianity, as presented in the Scriptures, 
is a composite fabric ; — the woof of Christ's per- 
sonal spirit thrown across the warp of an antecedent 
Judaism: and it is not fairly answerable for flaws 
and stains in that which it found already stretched 
upon the loom. Thus, when Mr. Newman imputes 
to the New Testament the doctrine, that God pun- 
ishes men " for holding an erroneous creed" (p. 168), 



PHASES OF FAITH. 255 

he states what is partially true, yet leaves on the 
whole an impression quite false. Such a sentiment 
is entirely foreign to the religion of Christ, as dis- 
tinguished from the previous Hebrew theology : and 
every thing which resembles it is an uncancelled 
remnant of the earlier system. From the very na- 
ture of the case, every theocratic scheme is neces- 
sarily exclusive. The Gospel, born within the limits 
of such doctrines, could not, in taking all their grand- 
eur, escape at once the whole of their severity. But 
its entire tendency was to destroy the previous nar- 
rowness ; and to throw open, as well as purify, the 
terms of communion with God. For exclusion by 
race and other arbitrary external disqualifications, it 
substituted exclusion by spiritual condition alone. It 
may be said, that the required spiritual condition in- 
volved a creed. Even this, however, though unde- 
niably true, is not a characteristic description of the 
fact. It was reverence for a Person, not reception 
of Propositions, which constituted the Apostolic test; 
an allegiance of soul to the heavenly Christ, not an 
affirmation by the intellect of metaphysic dogmas. 
And may it not be reasonably doubted whether, 
under the then condition of the world, any other test 
could have effected a truer moral partition of that 
portion of mankind with which the Apostles came 
in contact? If our modern doctrine — of God's 
indifference to men's creed — had been propagated 
in an age when creed was no affair of conscientious 
private judgment, but was mixed up inseparably 
with moral and social causes, and if the Apostle of 
the Gentiles had preached at Ephesus and Corinth 



256 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

out of the " Essays on the Formation and Publica- 
tion of Opinions," how would the Divine crusade 
have prospered against the zealotry of Jerusalem and 
the idolatrous corruptions of the Roman Empire? 
Paul, avowedly expecting an end of the world, pro- 
claimed a divine classification of mankind in regard 
to that great catastrophe, — a classification involving 
probably no such incorrect moral estimate after all. 
If, by an absurd Bibliolatry, men have imported a 
division, similar in sound but not in sense, into a 
stage of the world and conditions of human charac- 
ter never contemplated by him, with what justice 
are his writings made answerable for the folly and 
narrow-heartedness of his readers ? The same re- 
fusal to take any account of historical conditions 
influences our author's judgment as to the doctrine 
of demoniacal possession. That this superstition 
embodied in the Scriptures has been the cause of 
many evils, is incontrovertible. But causes anterior 
to Christianity created the superstition : a Bibliola- 
try, of which Christianity is independent, prolonged 
it. It is easy to expatiate upon the mischiefs of this 
or any other error left uneradicated by the new re- 
ligion ; but, unless we take into comparison the state 
in which the case had been before, or would have 
been without Christianity, we shut out the conditions 
of all rational judgment. For ourselves we are con- 
vinced that the Dualistic belief expressed in the doc- 
trine of possession is truer and more favorable to 
moral progress than any theory of unreduced evil 
accessible under the same conditions of the human 
intellect. To ask for the religious fruits of physical 



PHASES OF FAITH. 257 

science, before that science exists, appears to us in 
the highest degree unreasonable. 

The immense extent of ground traversed by our 
author's Biblical criticism renders it impossible for 
a Reviewer to follow him in detail. We would 
gladly have said something in defence of the Pauline 
logic, and the peculiar sources of the Pauline Gospel, 
as well as in correction of Mr. Newman's verdict 
respecting the fourth Gospel, — a verdict which ap- 
pears to us far too positive, and to some extent rest- 
ing on fanciful grounds. But these topics cannot be 
fairly treated without a minuteness of discussion of 
which our readers would justly complain : and we 
confess our inability, from consciousness of the real 
difficulties attending them, to deal with them in any 
very confident and dogmatic tone. We are not sure, 
however, that the Apostolic " logic " which our author 
so much slights was not, on some points, sounder 
than our own ; and we cannot share his tin qualified 
distrust of all subjective impressions as media of 
revelation. We are the less able to discuss these 
questions with him, because we cannot make a con- 
sistent whole of his own logic of evidence in relation 
to them. He distinctly lays it down (p. 152), that 
" it is in the spirit alone that we meet God, not in 
the communications of sense " ; yet objects to Paul's 
aTroKaKvyjns, that we know not whether " he saw or 
heard a sound " (p. 148), and that " he learned his 
Gospel by an internal revelation" (p. 181). He ad- 
mits that it "was to the inward senses that the first 
preachers of Christianity appealed, as the supreme 
arbiters in the whole religious question" (p. 156) ; 
22* 



258 

and that " all evidence for Christianity must be 
moral evidence " (p. 217) : yet his complaint is al- 
ways of the want of external guaranty. If all the 
evidence must be moral and spiritual, then all mat- 
ters not included in this category leave the evidence 
untouched : and the religion remains unaffected by 
the errors in history, geography, construction of mir- 
acle, and logic, which our author discerns in its first 
records. In short, the proof is allowed to be exclu- 
sively moral and spiritual : yet the disproof alleged 
is historical, scientific, and metaphysical. 

In his criticism of Doctrine, Mr. Newman com- 
ments on the theory of Christianity, to which we 
have already referred with approval, viz. that the 
religion is embodied in the Life and Spirit of Christ, 
who is a perfect man and the moral image of God. 
He assigns " many decisive reasons " why it was 
impossible " that such a train of thought could rec- 
ommend itself to him for a moment." The first of 
these reasons is, that Religion would still remain a 
problem of literature; for, beautiful as the picture 
of Jesus may be, how but by a refined and elaborate 
criticism can we tell whether the portrait may not 
be imaginary instead of real ? "We reply, Religion 
may fitly remain thus far a problem of literature ; 
nor is it apparent how we are ever, except through 
the medium of preservative records, to be placed in 
mental contact with the objects of just reverence that 
have visited our world ; yet are these objects the 
grand agencies for the devout education of individ- 
uals and nations. So long, indeed, as it is asserted 
that faith in Christ is the condition of salvation and 



PHASES OF FAITH. 259 

the essential to the Divine favor, it is grossly incon- 
sistent to make it at the same time contingent on a 
trembling balance of critical evidence : and against 
the exclusive scheme of orthodox churches, this ob- 
jection presses with irresistible weight ; for there the 
propositions to be accepted are of infinite intricacy, 
and the results of mistake, a hopeless and eternal 
ruin. But in the theory now before us, the burden 
of consequences is reduced to the ordinary freight of 
truth and error ; and the critical problem — whether 
such a being as Jesus Christ really lived, and was 
such as the Gospels and Paul represent — is so sim- 
ple, that no serious uncertainty can be pretended in 
respect to it. Mr. Newman appears to us to strain 
till it breaks the principle that religion must ask for 
nothing beyond the individual spirit of the ignorant 
human being. To insist that it shall owe nothing 
to the Past, and be the same as if there were no his- 
tory ; to demand that each shall find it for himself 
de novo, as if he were the first man and the only 
man ; to rely, for its truth or its progress, on its per- 
petual personal reproduction in isolated minds, — is 
to require terms which the nature of man forbids and 
the Providence of God will disappoint. Transmitted 
influence from soul to soul, whether among contem- 
poraries, or down the course of time, is not only as 
natural, but as spiritual, as the direct relation of each 
worshipper of God. Indeed, traditional faith — com- 
municated reverence — is that which distinguishes 
the nobler religion of civilized and associated nations 
from the egotism of Fetish worship : and it cannot 
be that a tendency which only a few lonely minds 



260 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

are capable or desirous of escaping, is without any 
proper function in the world. Nor is it right to 
judge these Unitarians who are the objects of Mr, 
Newman's strictures as if their doctrine were " new," 
as if they went back on a general excursion through 
history, and fetched up thence, by their private se- 
lection, a person fit to be the moral image of God. 
They merely attempt to state the essential spirit of 
a ready-made fact. They observe a past and pres- 
ent Christendom, actually worshipping a God who 
is the glorified resemblance of Christ. They have 
not to establish the habit, and make good the whole 
series of antecedents from which it has arisen : but, 
finding it in possession of the field, to make a just 
estimate of its intrinsic truth and excellence. Look- 
ing at it thus, they simply say, " This is good, this 
is the truest and divinest of which we can think ; 
the moral instinct of Christendom is right." It will 
be time enough to present complaints on behalf of 
the poor and uneducated, when the majesty and 
sanctity of Christ's mind have practically become as 
liable to doubt, as the reality of some of the miracles, 
and the authorship of some of the books. Mean- 
while, we believe the intuitive feeling to be perfectly 
well founded, that superhuman goodness cannot be 
feigned by any act of free imagination ; and to be 
fully justified by that " vast moral chasm between 
the Gospel and the very earliest Christian writers," 
which left upon Mr. Newman himself a " sense of 
the unapproachable greatness of the New Testa- 
ment." And after all, come what may of the possi- 
bility of critical verification, the Divine Image fur- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 261 

nished by the life of Christ is now secured to the 
soul of Christendom, — presides in secret over its 
moral estimates, directs its aspirations, and inspires 
its worship. In proportion as this educative function 
of historical reverence is protracted and complete, 
does it become of less moment to verify its sources 
in detail. The eye, once couched and trained to the 
usages of vision, does not relapse into the dark, 
when the traces are lost or the knowledge is wanting 
of the process and instrument of recovery. And 
when called upon to quit its estimate of the holiness 
of Christ, by critics who say, " Give God the praise ; 
we know that this man is a sinner " ; Christendom, 
like the disciple blind from his birth, may be con- 
tent to reply, " Whether he be a sinner or no, I know 
not : one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, 
now I see." 

To the form of Christianity which we are consid- 
ering, Mr. Newman further objects that the asserted 
perfectness in the character of Christ is wholly im- 
aginary ; and, if he were physically human, intrinsi- 
cally incredible. As the first of these allegations is 
simply an expression of the author's personal dis- 
taste, and is not otherwise supported than by the 
statement, that, for his part, he prefers Fletcher of 
Madeley (himself, we presume, a disciple) to Jesus 
of Nazareth, it admits of no reply beyond an expres- 
sion of surprise at an estimate so singular. Even 
the vagaries of Rousseau led him to no such eccen- 
tricity of scepticism ; and amid doubt of every au- 
thoritative claim, he closed the Gospel with the 
acknowledgment that Jesus " lived and died like a 



262 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

God." Certainly, if Dr. Fletcher of Madeley does 
really appear to our author a perfect man, he must 
and will (whether the fact be recognized or not) so 
far assume in his mind. the function of Christ, as to 
furnish the richest moral elements to his conception 
of God. But for ourselves we must confess a diffi- 
culty — unfelt perhaps by Mr. Newman, but com- 
mon to all dependent minds — in standing quite 
alone in admiration, and trusting our absolutely sol- 
itary perceptions, as we should those in which thou- 
sands of brethren joined with us, and declared the 
light of heavenly beauty to lie upon the very spot 
which it paints for us. The established power of a 
soul over multitudes of others, — its historic great- 
ness, — its productiveness, through season after sea- 
son of this world, in the fruits of sanctity, must in- 
evitably enter as an element into our veneration: 
and scarcely do we dare, by free homage of the 
heart, to own the trace of God in another's life, till 
we find our comrades in sympathy with us. Till 
then, we feel as though we might be magnifying our 
idiosyncrasies, and throwing over the universe the 
speck or tint of our own eye. Therefore it is that 
no private person, even though he more intensely 
stirs the distinctive affections of our narrow individ- 
uality, can ever come into just comparison with 
Christ, or become the object of that broad and trust- 
ful reverence which rather' draws the soul out of it- 
self, than drives it more closely inward. We know 
there must be a limit to this dependence ; and we 
honor from our hearts those who, from clearness of 
eye and courage of soul, can be first disciples of any 



PHASES OF FAITH. 263 

prophet of God. But even they do not contemplate 
remaining alone ; they live on the concurrence of 
the future, though not of the present and the past, 
and attest the ideal need of sympathy to faith. Be- 
tween the boldness of him who interprets the future 
exclusively by himself, and the dependent temper of 
those who correct and confirm themselves by refer- 
ence to the past, we will not attempt to adjust the 
balance. But Fletcher of Madeley does not tempt 
us to sever ourselves from the common conscious- 
ness of Christendom. Mr. Newman, in treating of 
this topic, advances a logical criticism to which we 
can by no means subscribe : — 

"It is not fair to ask (as some whom I exceedingly re- 
spect do ask), that those who do not admit Jesus to be fault- 
less and the very image of God, will specify and establish 
his faults. This is to demand that we will presume him to 
be perfect, until we find him to be imperfect. Such a pre- 
sumption is natural with those who accept him as an angel- 
ic being ; absurd in one who regards him as a genuine man, 
with no preternatural origin and power. If by sensible and 
physical proof the orthodox can show that he is God incar- 
nate, it will be reasonable to assume that he is a perfect 
specimen of moral excellence, and after this it will be diffi- 
cult to criticize. But when sensible proof of his immacu- 
late conception and of his Godhead is allowed not to exist, 
and maintained to be abstractedly impossible, I have no 
words to express my wonder at that logic which starts by 
acknowledging and establishing his simple manhood, pro- 
ceeds to presume his absolute moral perfection, throws on 
others the task of disproving the presumption, and regards 
their silence as a verification that he is God manifest in the 
flesh." — p. 211. 



264 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

In spite of these startling expressions of wonder, 
we must persist in presuming Jesus to be perfect till 
shown to be imperfect. We derive our estimate of him 
wholly from the picture presented in the Gospels, — 
purified certainly by seme critical clearances, defensi- 
ble by canons of internal evidence, — and so long as 
this picture presents no moral imperfections, we must 
decline supplying them out of the resources of fancy. 
In presuming Christ to be perfect, we simply refuse to 
suppose a drawback on what we see from what we 
do not see, and insist on forming our judgment from 
the known, without arbitrary modification from the 
unknown. No doubt Jesus, as a being open to temp- 
tation, was intrinsically capable of sin : but this, as 
a set-off against the positive evidence of holiness, 
no more proves actual imperfection, than the mere 
capacity for goodness in the wicked proves their 
actual perfection. How can character ever be esti- 
mated but by the phenomena through which it ex- 
presses itself in the life ? and how can these be set 
aside by abstract cpnsiderations respecting the rank 
and parentage of the moral agent? According to 
our author, we are to distrust our own moral percep- 
tions, and believe apparent beauty to be real deform- 
ity, until a physical proof of Godhead is super- 
added: and we are, in this instance, to contradict 
his own rule, that spiritual discernment requires no 
voucher from external miracle. We are at a loss to 
conceive in what way a superhuman physical nature 
could tend in the least degree to render moral per- 
fection more credible. The classifications of Natu- 
ral History are not to be obtruded upon Religion, 



PHASES OF FAITH. 265 

and gradations of excellence to be merged in distinc- 
tions of Species. Christ had the liability to sin, not 
because he was human, but because he was free ; 
and whatever presumption of imperfection arises 
hence, would have arisen no less, had he been an 
angel of the highest rank. All souls are of one spe- 
cies : or rather are lifted above the level where diver- 
sity of species prevails, so as to range, not with Na- 
ture, but with God. The same Laws, the same 
Love, the same Will, the same Worship, pervade 
them all, and make them of one clan ; nor is there 
any portion of the series whence a perfect sanctity 
might not be evolved with equal possibility and with 
similar result. It is strange that Mr. Newman 
should stipulate for the immaculate conception, as 
a condition of believing any exalted character in 
Christ; and should forget that the Gospel which 
makes him diviner than all the rest (that of John), 
knows nothing of the miraculous birth, and teaches, 
apart from all physical conditions, the very doctrine 
now the object of remark. That the Apostle Paul 
never dwelt on the earthly life of Christ; that no 
relics, no holy coats, and other results of tender and 
human affection for an historical personage, ap- 
peared in the first age, proves no more than that the 
expectation of the near Advent withdrew the mind 
of the early Church from the Past to the Future, 
and kindled a faith too dazzling for quiet retrospec- 
tion. The personal object, however, though placed 
in the imaginary scene before, instead of among the 
realities behind, was still the same. And as soon as 
the anticipation of his reappearance faded away, 
23 



266 MARTINEAlj's MISCELLANIES. 

the eye of the Church, unable to quit the image, 
changed its direction, and sought him where alone 
he was to be found, in the fields of Palestine and the 
courts of Jerusalem; and thenceforth enthusiastic 
hope was replaced by historic reverence. Indeed, the 
stories of the Birth and Infancy with which two of 
the Gospels open, show that the retrospective atti- 
tude of faith had already been assumed. It is vain 
to quote Paul against this view, and in favor of an 
estimate which reduces the earthly life of Jesus to 
"commonplace." If to him the Christ above was 
the "Ideal of glorified human nature," — heavenly 
before his birth, heavenly after his death, — how, in 
the intermediate ministry on earth, could Paul, like 
Mr. Newman, suppose him quite common and undi- 
vine ? If the history of that ministry failed to sup- 
port the impression of the Pauline ideal, how could 
the Apostle's theory escape the most formidable diffi- 
culties ? It was the same Jesus that had presented 
himself in both spheres : and the unity of the charac- 
ter must be preserved by those whose veneration is 
directed towards him in either. Paul's imagination 
descended from Christ in heaven to Christ on earth ; 
ours ascends from Christ on earth to Christ in heaven ; 
and ends with enthroning him where Paul first knew 
him. Whichever path of transition be taken, the 
moral conception of the Person must be the same ; 
having on him the traces of that ideal perfectness in 
the faith of which both theories terminate. The ac- 
ceptance of Christ, therefore, as the moral image of 
God, appears to us to be strictly involved in the 
Pauline Gospel, and to be quite as compatible with 
a human as with an angelic rank. 



PHASES OF FAITH. 267 

Mr. Newman objects in conclusion against this 
version of Christianity, that it attempts to combine 
incompatible conditions, — to save free Criticism 
without sacrificing Authority : and that there is 
" something intensely absurd in accepting Jesus as 
the Messiah, and refusing to acknowledge him as 
the authoritative teacher •, to whose wisdom we must 
pay perpetual, unlimited, unhesitating homage" 
(p. 212). Now we fully concur with our author in 
rejecting all notion of an absolute oracle, to whose 
dicta we are submissively to bow : nor do we know 
of any general proposition which we should think it 
right to accept merely on the word of Jesus. We 
further allow, that this withdrawal from him of the 
oracular function probably is at variance with the 
Jewish conception of Messiah's office. But we deny 
that it is at variance with the Christian conception 
of a moral type of Divine Perfectness. The most 
faultless administration of life, the most saintly com- 
munion with God, the divinest symmetry of soul, 
may surely coexist with limited knowledge : and sin- 
lessness of Conscience does not require Omniscience 
in the Understanding. To be no great scholar in 
Chaldee, and ill-read in the Court-annals of the Se- 
leucidse, and consequently make mistakes about the 
book of Daniel, and not see what is invisible in the 
destinies of the Roman empire, — how does this 
hinder the exercise of pure affection and the life of 
holy faithfulness ? Goodness is qualitative ; knowl- 
edge is quantitative: and throughout every variety 
in the quantity, immaculateness is possible in the 
quality. In the power natural to the higher soul 



68 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

over the lower, in the silent appeal which the beauty 
of its holiness makes to the struggling and feeble 
will, there is indeed an exercise of authority, and of 
the only kind that is ultimately possible : but it in- 
volves no intellectual dictation, and is indeed consist- 
ent with none : it gives not a true proposition to our 
assent, but a divine object to our perception : and 
while the moral and spiritual intuition are reverently 
engaged upon the person, leaves the logical under- 
standing free play among all ideas. Mr. Newman 
is fond of drawing the distinction between the spirit- 
ual and the intellectual in the case of ordinary men. 
No one demonstrates more convincingly the indepen- 
dence of religious insight on all conclusions of the 
scientific judgment and states of objective knowl- 
edge ; protests more strongly against every demand 
of right belief in matters external as a test of near- 
ness to God ; or better shows the open communion 
of the Father of Lights with his children in propor- 
tion to their purity of heart, irrespective of the cul- 
ture and correctness of the mind. Why is this to be 
true of the disciples, and false of the Master ? "With 
what consistency is the Spirit of God made indif- 
ferent to intellectual conditions in the one case, yet 
tested by infallibility in the other? Our author has 
only to extend to the Founder the conception of in- 
spiration on which he insists in the Church; and he 
obtains the completest answer to his own demand 
for an oracular Christ. 

The reaction of our author's mind against his 
early belief does not affect merely his views of the 
sources of Christianity. He criticizes also its history ; 



PHASES OF FAITH. 269 

and denies its beneficent agency, even in directions 
wherein it has hitherto been regarded as scarcely 
open to challenge. It has done nothing, he thinks, 
to improve the condition of the woman or the slave : 
its spread, no less than that of Mohammedanism, has 
been the work of the sword : and it has rather re- 
stricted, than produced, the benefits of the Reforma- 
tion. Nothing in this volume has so much amazed 
us as the disproportion between the magnitude of 
these propositions and the slenderness of the grounds 
on which they are made to rest. First, as to the con- 
dition of women ; he urges, that " the real elevators 
of the female sex are the poets of Germanic culture, 
who have vindicated the spirituality of love and its 
attraction to character " (p. 165) ; that the Apostle 
Paul, far from reaching any such sentiment, discour- 
ages marriage, except as a means of escaping the 
temptations of passion; and that in the South of 
Europe, where Germanic feeling has taken no root, 
the relative position of the sexes is not improved. 
In relation to this question, as to many others, we 
protest against the identification with Christianity 
itself of the personal views of this or that Apostle : 
we are not to seek in the crude germ of the religion 
for that which belongs to its full and developed fruit. 
It is enough (and this surely is incontrovertible) that 
Paul's doctrine on this subject was a vast improve- 
ment on the Gentile morality which it replaced ; that 
the rules which he imposed on the administrators 
and members of Christian communities were the 
only ones which could give scope for the spontane- 
ous growth of the best sentiments; and that his 
23* 



270 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

treatment of the case, having exclusive reference to 
the end of the world supposed to be imminent, was 
never intended to serve for all time, and owed to its 
provisional purpose whatever is questionable in it. 
And after all, unjust as it is to measure the ultimate 
tendency of an historical influence by its incipient 
phenomena, there does appear to us a manifest trace, 
in the first age itself, of an ennobling influence from 
the recognized spiritual equality of the sexes. The 
women of Galilee and the sisters of Bethany, the 
helpers of Paul in Macedonia and Corinth, the mar- 
tyred deaconesses of Lyons and Carthage, were 
surely lifted by their faith into a consciousness of the 
claims of the soul, to which nothing in Pagan antiq- 
uity can present a moral parallel. We have no de- 
sire to derogate from the just merits of German sen- 
timent ; or to establish any competition of pretension 
between its influence and that of Christianity. But 
is it too much to say that, for the production of their 
beneficent results, the two agencies had to concur ; 
and that if, on the one hand, the religion was com- 
paratively barren till it struck upon the German soul, 
so, on the other, that soul had but the latent capacity 
for nobler development till quickened by reception 
of the religion ? We certainly believe that the chief 
function of the first eight centuries of the Church was 
to hand over the religion to its proper receptacle in the 
Teutonic mind, — there for the first time to exhibit 
on a large scale its native vitality and find its ap- 
pointed nourishment. Still, if we remember right, 
the chivalric poetry arose, not in the Germanic race, 
but among the Romanesque tribes of Spain, France, 



PHASES OF FAITH. 271 

and Italy ; and flourished most where the Albigen- 
sian spirit had freest way and the power of the priest- 
hood was most weakened. Sismondi remarks the co- 
incidence, in the Romance literature, of an elevated 
sentiment towards woman, with bitter satire upon 
the clergy : and we apprehend it was a true instinct 
which led the poet, inspired with any delicate and 
noble love, to turn his antipathies upon the sacerdo- 
tal system. That system it is which to this day pre- 
vents the sanctity and lowers the dignity of domes- 
tic life in the South of Europe ; and makes the dif- 
ference between the love which figures in an Italian 
opera, and that which breathes in the strains of Ten- 
nyson. It cannot be pretended that the Papal and 
priestly institutions, at whose door the evil is to be 
laid, afford any true representation of the religion of 
Christ. "Wherever the characteristic sentiments of 
Christianity have had free action, wherever the faith 
has prevailed that life is a divine trust, committed to 
souls dear to God, equal among themselves, and 
each the germ of an immortality, there, and there 
alone, has domestic affection been so touched with 
reverence and confidence, as to retain its freshness 
to the end, and afford a chastening discipline through 
life. The doctrines about the " Rights of Woman," 
which have sprung from theories of political equality, 
and disowned the partnership of religious sentiment, 
have invariably produced great moral laxity : and, in 
spite of high imaginative talk, fascinating to excita- 
ble natures, yield nothing truly noble, but only the 
monster greatness of mingled intellect and passion. 
The man and the woman can never learn each 



272 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

other's infinite worth, except in the absence of the 
priest, and in the presence of their God. Who can 
deny that this secret has been learned among the les- 
sons of a Christian civilization ? 

The credit assigned to Christianity as the foe of 
slavery is also, in our author's opinion, unmerited. 
No Apostle denounces the system; which receives 
indeed a sort of sanction from the silence of the New 
Testament respecting it, and from Paul's act of send- 
ing back Onesimus to his master Philemon. Good 
Pagan Emperors of Rome softened the rigors of 
slavery, but during the several centuries in which 
Christianity acted in the empire, it produced no op- 
position to the system. In modern times, serfdom 
was abolished by the kings in their desire to raise 
the chartered cities as an arm against the barons. 
And black slavery received its first act of abolition 
from atheistic France ; its next from England, im- 
pelled by that one among her sects which least re- 
gards the letter of Scripture. 

This style of criticism is so evidently founded on 
the conception of Christianity as an oracular system, 
bound to pronounce distinctly on all considerable 
matters, human or divine, that, in simply treating 
the religion as an historical development through the 
influence of reverence for a person, we have already 
suggested the reply. The operation of such a cause 
was necessarily gradual, and could not produce the 
sudden and general protests demanded by Mr. New- 
man. Its action was not through any revealed econ- 
omy of social life, but through the introduction of 
men, one by one, into spiritual relations incompati- 



PHASES OF FAITH. 273 

ble with the sentiments of the slave. That Chris- 
tianity opened its arms to the servile class at all, was 
enough : for in its embrace was the sure promise of 
emancipation. In proof of this we need no other 
witness than our author himself, who says : — 

" Zeal for the liberation of serfs in Europe first rose in 
the breasts of the clergy, after the whole population had be- 
come nominally Christian. It was not men, but Christians, 
that the clergy of the Middle Ages desired to make free." 

— p. 167. 

#» 

What more emphatic expression could the religion 
give of its hostility to slavery than this, that all men 
were to become Christians, and that no Christian 
should remain a slave ? Is it imputed as a disgrace, 
that it put conversion before manumission, and 
brought them to God, ere it trusted them with them- 
selves ? To our mind this is the true and divine or- 
der, — a new life within to rule the new lot without, 

— Conscience, Lord of the Soul, invoked to succeed 
the feudal lord of the soil. If Christianity were pa- 
tient of Heathenism, if it had no generous propa- 
gandism, it might be charged with narrowness in 
only redeeming its own. But its Missionary spirit 
forbade its ever providing itself with slaves from the 
Pagan class, while its own children had their liberty. 
It created the simultaneous obligation to make the 
Pagan a convert, and the convert free. That this 
tendency exhibited but faint traces in the earliest 
age of the Church is due, not merely to the small 
comparative numbers of the disciples, but no less to 
their expectation of an immediate close to this 



274 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

world's affairs. The only reason why Paul sanc- 
tioned contentment with his condition in the con- 
verted slave was, that, for so short a time, it was not 
worth while for any man to change his state; he 
that was free was already the Lord's bondsman ; 
and he that was bound, the Lord's freeman. In pro- 
portion as this anticipation retreated, society began 
to feel the tendency of the new religion. Doubtless 
the condition of the servile class was ameliorated by 
the legislation of good Pagan emperors : and not on- 
ly the precepts of Seneca, but the edicts of Hadrian, 
Trajan, and Antoninus attest the growth of just and 
humane sentiments. But the steady agency of 
Christianity availed incomparably more than the 
happy accident of wisdom and virtue in a prince. 
All its ordinances were open indiscriminately to 
bond and free ; nor was servile birth any disqualifi- 
cation for the discharge of Church functions, — from 
the humble office of the two slave-girls mentioned in 
Pliny's letter to Trajan, to the dignity of the Episco- 
pate itself. This rule stands in strong contrast with 
the Roman law, according to which no public office 
could be held by a slave. The exercise of the sacred 
duties suspended the rights of the master, and in 
case of the permanent assumption of the monastic 
habit, or the appointment to a bishopric, entirely 
abolished them. The Christian indissolubility of 
marriage seriously curtailed the owner's established 
rights, though it was long before it openly took the 
legal place of the previous contubernia. The influ- 
ence of the Church was vigorously exerted against 
the barbarous treatment of the servile class: and 



PHASES OF FAITH. 



275 



Clement of Alexandria enjoins the bishop to reject 
the offerings of masters, " qui fame, verberibus, acer- 
bo dominatu, familiam suam vexarent." And when 
an ill-used slave fled from the persecution of his own- 
er to a Christian altar, he found a powerful protec- 
tion in the officiating ecclesiastics ; who were bound 
to intercede actively on his behalf, and, failing of 
success, to permit to him the usual shelter of the 
sanctuary. Constantine was the first to enact laws 
against separating the members of the same servile 
family ; justifying his edict by the words, " Quis 
enim ferat liberos a parentibus, a fratribus uxores, a 
viris conjuges segregari ? " Mr. Newman mentions, 
among the horrors of Roman slavery, that " young 
women of beautiful persons were sold as articles of 
voluptuousness" : but he does not mention that the 
first Christian Emperors authorized the clergy to re- 
deem from the Lupanaria the wretched victims who 
had there suffered the fate of St. Agnes ; or that, by 
a law of Theodoric, the seducer of a slave girl was 
not only bound to her thenceforth, but subjected for 
life to her master's service. An indication of the di- 
rection which was assumed by the sympathies of the 
new religion is afforded by the fact, that, from the 
time of Constantine, the process of manumission 
was for the most part transferred to the Church, and 
formed part of the ceremonies at Easter, and the 
other ecclesiastical festivals. And under the auspi- 
ces of Christian Emperors, the facilities for manu- 
mission were so greatly increased, that, after the im- 
pediments removed by Justinian, freedom became 
the rule, and slavery the exception, among the poor- 



276 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

er subjects of the empire.* So clear, indeed, is the 
tendency of Christianity on this matter, that if our 
author had made his attack from the opposite side, 
and contended that its doctrines proved too much 
against servitude, and assumed with too little quali- 
fication the capacity of each man for self-rule, we 
should have felt more hesitation in expressing our 
dissent. We certainly feel that the religious im- 
pulse under which, in Christian times, every assault 
upon slavery has been conducted, requires for its 
wise and efficient operation a larger admixture of 
worldly moderation and economical forethought, 
than zeal and generosity are willing to allow. 

But few words will be needful in reference to our 
author's theory of the Reformation. In his view, 
this great event is due, not to the Bible, but to Free 
Learning, especially to the moral works of Cicero 
and Boethius, which " effected what (strange to 
think) the New Testament could not do " (p. 158). 
He inclines to think that the change would have 
been better brought about, if Luther had never lived ; 
and, while crediting the Pagan writers with the re- 
covery of Europe, convicts the Scriptures of ineffi- 

* See Plin. Traj. Imp. Lib. x. ep. 97. Justinian's Novella, cxxiii. 
4. v. 2. Clem. Alex, const, apost. iv. Cod. Theodos.ii. tit. 25. Gib- 
bon, Ch. 44, and Blair's Inq. into the State of Slavery amongst the 
Romans, passim ; especially pp. 127, 168-174; and 247, where it is 
shown that "St Paul would, under any circumstances, have had no 
choice, but to send Onesimus to his master. The detention of a fugi- 
tive slave was considered the same offence as a theft, and would, no 
doubt, infer liability to prosecution for damages, under that head, or 
under the rules with regard to corrupting slaves, — or the Aquilian law, 
respecting reparation of injury done." 



PHASES OF FAITH. 277 

ciency, for not having prevented its previous lapse 
into barbarism and superstition. 

The Reformation arose, not from the Bible, but 
from Free Learning ! This appears to us like say- 
ing that the harvest comes, not from the seed-corn, 
but from good farming ; or that the ship makes its 
voyage, not by the wind, but by navigation. Would 
our author have had the Bible produce the Reforma- 
tion vrithout Free Learning, — that is, without being 
applied to the European mind at all ? If not, what is 
the meaning- of this false antithesis between the state 
of the human faculties and the object on which they 
are employed? and of the strange exaction that the 
Scriptures, once put on parchment, should be able, 
whether men could procure and read them or not, 
to overrule all the causes of internal corruption and 
external ruin, beneath which the Roman civilization 
succumbed ? A " self-sustaining power " like this, a 
power to remain independent of perturbation from 
foreign influences, and to evolve like phenomena 
from the most unlike conditions of the human 
mind, is intrinsically inconceivable. Be a religion 
ever so divine, from the moment that it is con- 
signed to human media and delivered to the keeping 
of mankind, it inevitably shares the fate of all the 
intellectual and spiritual possessions of our race, and 
rises and sinks with the tides of history. If our 
author's favorites, — the Latin moralists, — accom- 
plished at the revival of learning what the Scriptures 
could not do, they availed as little as the Scriptures 
to prevent its previous decline ; and when Europe 
" sank into the gulf of Popery," she had Cicero and 
24 



278 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

Boethius, no less than "the Bible in her hands." 
But " without free intellect," as Mr. Newman truly 
observes of the ancient Attic literature in the hands 
of the Greeks of Constantinople, " the works of their 
fathers did their souls no good": and is not the plea 
equally valid, that, without free intellect, the works 
of evangelists and apostles could do the souls of 
disciples no good ? No Protestant ever disputed the 
need of Free Learning as an essential condition of 
the Reformation : and the only question is, whether 
the modern changes in the religion of Christendom 
arose from the free study of the Scriptures, or from 
the free study of the Pagan writers ? It is difficult 
to discuss such a question with gravity. If our 
author really thinks that the Huguenots derived 
their inspiration from Seneca and the Puritans from 
Cicero ; if he imagines Marcus Antoninus in the 
pocket of the Brownists, and Epictetus beneath the 
pillow of John Knox, he entertains a conception of 
modern history more peculiar than that of the Angli- 
can theologians themselves. We had always imag- 
ined, that, from the time of Petrarch, the ancient 
literature was nowhere more assiduously studied 
than in Italy; which, nevertheless, witnessed no 
" improvement of spiritual doctrine," and was not as- 
suming, under the patronage of the Medicis and the 
Papacy of Leo, a course of development very prom- 
ising for religious truth and moral earnestness. The 
assertion that the Reformation would have been 
more beneficent, had the Reformers never lived, be- 
longs to a kind of speculation which appears to us 
fruitful in delusion. That concurrently with the rise 



PHASES OF FAITH. 



279 



of those great leaders there existed a general ferment 
of mind in Europe favorable to their influence, is un- 
deniable ; that, if they had not appeared, this condi- 
tion would have manifested itself in some direction, 
drawing into it many of the energies which they be- 
spoke, we have no doubt ; but that this substituted 
phenomenon would have been " the Reformation," 
analogous in its characteristics and equivalent in its 
merits, is a proposition beyond the reach of human 
evidence, belonging to the computation of contin- 
gents, the scientia media of Molina's God. It is as 
little possible to conceive of the Reformation with- 
out Luther, as to imagine an Evangelicism without 
Paul, or even a Christianity without Christ. 

A few topics in this volume we must leave un- 
touched ; an omission which will be more readily 
excused, we fear, than the handling of so many. In 
parting from it, we restate our conviction that Mr. 
Newman exaggerates the resources of the purely 
subjective side of Religion, and undervalues its ob- 
jective conditions. A spirit like his own may doubt- 
less draw, from the mere depth of its inner experi- 
ence, a faith and trust adequate to the noble gover- 
nance of life. But just as the Intellect of mere meta- 
physicians, spinning assiduously from its own centre 
without fixed points of attachment for its threads, pro- 
duces as many tissues of thought as there are orig- 
inal thinkers ; so the Soul of mere spiritualists, in 
attempting to evolve every thing from within without 
any datum of historical reverence, must create as 
many religions as there are worshippers. As we 
have faith in a Common Reason, so have we in a 



280 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

Common Conscience, of mankind ; the eye, in the 
one case of natural, in the other of divine truth : but 
liable, in both instances, to the same law, — that 
objects not ideal but real be given for perception and 
appreciation ; objects, not different for each observer, 
but large and conspicuous enough to fix simultane- 
ously the universal vision. The grand objects of the 
physical universe, discernible from every latitude, 
look in at the understanding of all nations, and secure 
the unity of Science. And the glorious persons of 
human history, imperishable from the traditions of 
every civilized people, keeping their sublime glance 
upon the Conscience of ages, create the unity of 
Faith. And if it hath pleased God the Creator to 
fit up one system with one Sun, to make the day- 
light of several worlds ; so may it fitly have pleased 
God the Revealer to kindle amid the ecliptic of his- 
tory One Divine Soul, to glorify whatever lies with- 
in the great year of his moral Providence, and repre- 
sent the Father of Lights. The exhibition of Christ 
as his Moral Image has maintained in the souls of 
men a common spiritual type to correct the aberra- 
tions of their individuality, to unite the humblest and 
the highest, to merge all minds into one family, — 
and tha^ the family of God. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.* 

[From the Westminster Eeview for April, 1850.] 

We have often wondered that the English, the 
most sensible, but the most illogical of nations, should 
endure so patiently the intricacies and uncertainties 
of their law. That the careless and acute Athenian 
should frequent his city's courts, with keen relish for 
the subtlest pleadings by which sophistry could en- 
tangle justice, is in keeping with the characteristics 
of his vivacious and intellectual race. But the do- 
cile attention with which an English grazier or tea- 
dealer, apter to deal with things than with words, 
will listen to long arguments on forms of evidence 
and points of law, content no less to let the decision 

* 1. The Church, the Crown, and the State: their Junction or their 
Separation ; considered in Two Sermons bearing reference to the Ju- 
dicial Committee of the Privy Council. By the Rev. W. J. E. Bennett, 
M. A., Perpetual Curate of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge. Third Edition. 
London. 1850. 

2. Lives of the English Saints. London. 1844, 1845, &c. 

3. The Temporalities of the Established Church, as they are, and 
as they might be. By William Beeston, an old Churchman. Lon- 
don. 1850. 

4. Religion, the Church, and the People ; a Sermon. By J. Hamil- 
ton Thorn. London. 1849. 

24* 



282 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

go by flaw than if taken on the merits, is a truly 
singular phenomenon. The man has no taste for 
verbal gymnastics ; and fine distinctions, if he can 
see them at all, give him the headache. The fact is, 
however, he has an obtuse feeling that, through all 
this play of ingenuity, justice on the whole gets sub- 
stantially done. Moreover, the mere legal quibbles 
are used as instruments of escape, not of condemna- 
tion, and fall in with his leanings to mercy. Once 
begin to confiscate the patrimonies of his neighbors 
by help of legal informalities, or to hang men by soph- 
ism, and he will give full proof of not only his love 
for real justice, but his aversion for logical semblance. 
As it is with law, so with divinity. Give the Eng- 
lish layman something like right on the whole, and 
he will not begrudge the lawyers an ample margin 
for the manoeuvres of a questionable skill. Give him 
something like truth on the whole, by which he may 
guide himself and live, and he will indulge the di- 
vines with license of unlimited talk, and even look 
with reverent admiration on ponderous libraries 
written about his simple creed. He looks no further 
into theology than the demeanor of the parish cler- 
gyman. Let the vicar and his curate read the ser- 
vice impressively, preach no novelties, light no can- 
dles, look after the village schools, make themselves 
useful at the board of guardians, and keep the neigh- 
bors on pleasant terms with one another, and, for 
aught he cares, they may suit themselves with any 
doctrine between Whitgift and Grotius, Laud and 
Tillotson. He looks on the clerical eagerness about 
dogma as he does on his wife's gossip and volumi- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 



283 



nous correspondence, — as inherent in the genius of 
the class, and somehow related to the nice percep- 
tion and voluble enthusiasm of which he himself 
feels the fascination. Only you must not ask him 
to take a part : his business-like habits are apt to 
bruise the graces ; and his plain understanding rubs 
out all the fine distinctions of the creeds. He leaves 
these things to ecclesiastics, and with so free an in- 
dulgence that there is scarcely any intensity of big- 
otry and absurdity that may not have its way, pro- 
vided he and his church are not positively committed 
to them. Folly and narrow-heartedness in one priest 
are counterbalanced by the wisdom and charity of 
another; the Calvinism of a Simeon by the Armini- 
anism of a Maltby ; the sacramental doctrine of 
Pusey by the ethical theology of Arnold. The Eng- 
lish are not a speculative people. And so long as 
they see such men as Whately, Thirlwall, and Sum- 
ner amicably seated on the same bench as Blom- 
field and Philpotts, no religious Churchman will miss 
there a representative of his faith, and the Estab- 
lished Church will gain the credit of being reason- 
ably open to varieties of opinion. The decisions 
in the Articles may be stringent, the pretensions of 
the ordination-service arrogant, and the imprecations 
of the creed unflinching ; but while they are not 
pressed into any visible form of ecclesiastical action, 
the persons of a few mild and charitable bishops suf- 
fice to counteract their effect, and to persuade men, 
fresh from the very sound of her anathemas, that 
they belong to the most liberal of churches. 

Till within the last fifteen years, the English clergy 



284 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

have well understood the conditions on which this 
favorable interpretation of their system depends. 
They have not, indeed, always confined their con- 
troversies within friendly bounds ; and an over- 
zealous bishop, like Dr. Marsh, might draw around 
his diocese a close cordon of eighty-seven questions 
for the exclusion of Calvinistic preachers. But they 
have kept these differences to themselves : they have 
not driven the secular by-stander to take sides ; they 
have, rather, relied on the inattention of the majority 
of laymen to dogmatic divinity ; and, amid internal 
heart-burnings, have accepted compliments from neu- 
tral admirers, on the generous latitude which ad- 
mits into one communion Parker and Burnet, New- 
ton and Paley. For some time past, however, they 
have evinced more ingenuousness and less discre- 
tion ; the boast of variety they have exchanged for 
pretensions to unity ; the inconsistencies which con- 
stituted their strength they would wipe out as a re- 
proach. The Anglican talks in high strain of the 
Catholic consent, as if he were not contradicted by 
the Bible- Society preacher in the next parish church. 
The Evangelical glorifies the Lutheran Reforma- 
tion, which his Tractarian neighbor denounces as an 
apostasy ; and the communion to which they have 
both taken vows is praised by the one as the great 
ally, by the other as the appointed barrier, to the 
Protestantism of Europe. Both parties affect to be 
ignorant that the Church of England is the product 
of compromise, and, in its scheme of doctrine and 
usage, has been voted into its form of existence by 
the accidents of party and the confused action and 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 285 

reaction of opinion. They pretend that it is con- 
structed around an " Idea " : as well might you look 
for such a thing in a Parliamentary resolution, framed 
to catch votes. It is a dangerous employment to 
hunt for theories in a system of pacified discrepan- 
cies ; for while such theories are sure to be mutually 
destructive, each necessarily insists on having the 
whole system to itself, and will let no lodgings 
under the same roof to its contradictory. Hence, 
differences, wide as those which rent Christendom 
asunder in the sixteenth century, coexist in the na- 
tional Church ; but coexist only till one class is 
strong enough to expel the other, or the nation pro- 
voked enough to silence both. It is now conspicu- 
ous, that the scope for various thought within our 
ecclesiastical pale is an involuntary merit. It is no 
result of a wise tolerance, but is openly treated as 
the vice of a lax discipline. The Bishop of Exe- 
ter leaves us in no doubt as to what the Church 
would be, if he might have the weeding of it ; and 
could the past, as well as the present, be cited before 
courts under his inspiration, it is curious to think 
how her history and libraries, no less than her pul- 
pits, would be thinned. The noblest lights of her 
literature would be put out. Had the Episcopal 
rules now contended for always prevailed, Barrow 
would have been known only by his lectures upon 
optics, and Samuel Clarke as an editor of Caesar ; 
Tillotson would not have preached at Lincoln's Inn, 
or Butler at the Rolls; no Cadworth would have 
meditated between heathen speculation and Chris- 
tian faith ; where the names of Berkeley and Cum- 



286 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

berland stand, the history of philosophy would have 
been blank ; Erasmus would have found no biog- 
rapher in Jortin, and Wallis no admirer in Whately ; 
Lowth and Whitby, Paley and Coppleston, — in 
short, all men whom a mild and modest temper has 
disinclined towards extreme views, or a clear intellect 
disqualified for sacerdotal pretensions, would have 
been lost to the services or adornment of the Church. 
The question which the ecclesiastical parties of the 
day are now trying among themselves is, whether a 
stupid uniformity, impossible to genius and repul- 
sive to scrupulous integrity, shall be forced upon the 
state religion. Momentous as that question is, it 
wakes up others far more ominous. The litigation 
in the Gorham case is on too large a scale, and in 
too curious a court, not to attract regards seldom di- 
rected to theological affairs. Men who doze through 
the sermon at their parish church are all attention 
at the rare chance of hearing dogma translated from 
the language of the pulpit into that of the bar. 
" Now, at least," they think, " we shall learn what 
all this is about. "We shall get some notion what 
the schemes are between which we have to choose." 
We are much mistaken if the result has not been 
general among the educated laity, of utter disgust at 
both ; of amazement to find themselves thrown back 
upon the scholastic jargon of the Middle Ages, and 
into the dreams of an unawakened civilization ; of 
shame at the utter unreality, the emptiness, the cold 
distance from nature and life, of the tenets said to 
constitute the religion of this nation. Every Eng- 
lishman has an interest in the Church, which is in- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 287 

trusted with the highest culture of the people, and 
for that end has been endowed with resources unex- 
ampled among Protestant spiritual corporations ; 
which monopolizes the Crown and the Universities ; 
which is protected by the oaths of Parliament, and 
represented in the House of Peers ; which distributes 
over the land an organized body of twelve thousand 
priests, whose primate is the highest of subjects, 
while her curates are in contact with the lowest ; 
whose vicissitudes mingle everywhere with the his- 
tory of his country, and sometimes almost make it ; 
and which still, in the eye of the world, represents 
the place which England is to hold in the ultimate 
retrospect on Christendom. In wading through the 
recent arguments of counsel on baptismal regen- 
eration and prevenient grace, we could not help 
asking ourselves, " How will this whole scheme of 
doctrine look when gazed at from an historic dis- 
tance, — like that from which we regard the banish- 
ment of Anaxagoras, or the trial of Socrates ? When 
classed among the systems of human thought upon 
divine things, and thrown into the series in which 
are reviewed the myths of Plato, the ethics of An- 
toninus, the Immanent Cause of Spinoza, and the 
moral theology of Kant, what figure will this Re- 
ligion of the English in the nineteenth century 
present ? " The future historian of opinion will 
write of us in this strain : — " The people who spoke 
the language of Shakspeare were great in the con- 
structive arts : the remains of their vast works evince 
an extraordinary power of combining and econo- 
mizing labor ; their colonies were spread over both 



288 MARTINEAu's MISCELLANIES. 

hemispheres, and their industry penetrated to the re- 
motest tribes ; they knew how to subjugate nature 
and to govern men : but the weakness of their 
thought presented a strange contrast to the vigor of 
their arm ; and though they were an earnest people, 
their conceptions of human life and its Divine Au- 
thor seem to have been of the most puerile nature. 
Some orations have been handed down, — apparent- 
ly delivered before one of their most dignified tribu- 
nals, — in which (as the notes to the last critical 
edition fully establish) the question is discussed, ' In 
what way the washing of new-born babies according 
to certain rules prevented God's hating them.' The 
curious feature is, that the discussion turns entirely 
upon the manner in which this wetting operated ; 
and no doubt seems to have been entertained by dis- 
putants, judges, or audience, that, without it, a child 
or other person dying would fall into the hands of 
an angry Deity, and be kept alive for ever to be tor- 
tured in a burning cave. Now, all researches into 
the contemporary institutions of the island show that 
its religion found its chief support among the classes 
possessing no mean station or culture, and that the 
education for the priesthood was the highest which 
the country afforded. This strange belief must be 
taken, therefore, as the measure, not of popular igno- 
rance, but of the most intellectual faith. A philoso- 
phy and worship embodying such a superstition can 
present nothing to reward the labor of research." 

It is a mistake to suppose that tenets of this kind 
may be prudently let alone, as out of contact with 
the interests of this life ; and to urge as a plea for 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 289 

indifference and silence, that theories about the fu- 
ture may be left to be corrected by the future. On 
the contrary, there is no heavier incubus upon the 
present than false visions and untrustful fears. Ideal 
though they be, they are a heavier burden than un- 
equal taxes and excessive toil. They depress the 
springs of hope, mar the simplicity of speech, set a 
police watch around the movements of thought, and 
drain off the natural joyousness of good hearts : and 
this, the paralysis of the person, is worse than the 
crippling of the lot. But their power will prove ad- 
equate to both; and only waits, till emboldened by 
indulgence, to crown the possession of the invisible 
world with the conquest of the visible. Already the 
very superstition of which we have spoken exercises 
no despicable tyranny, and is constantly demanding 
more. For instance, we were recently present at the 
following scene. An artisan, who had an infant in 
dangerous illness, hastened to the nearest clergyman, 
and implored him to come and baptize the child. 
The clergyman, a person of more sense and kind- 
ness than orthodoxy, questioned him as to the 
grounds of so urgent a wish, and intimated that, in 
his view, the admonition of parents, rather than any 
mystic operation on the child, constituted the essence 
of the rite ; so that, where the parental duties were 
about to be cancelled by death, he could scarcely feel 
that his ministrations" would be in place. The man, 
thus encouraged to speak out, protested that neither 
he nor his wife had the slightest faith in baptism. 
" But then, Sir," he added, " our parson will never 
bury the poor child if she has n't been sprinkled." 
25 



290 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

We know this to be a case of constant occurrence. 
The clergy are habitually employed to perform a rite 
on whose efficacy no one present has the faintest re- 
liance, and which is submitted to as a part of the 
funeral fee; and they are thus the occasion of sur- 
rounding the cradle of the tenderest death with sul- 
len unbelief and hypocrisy. The guilty pretence is 
not felt by the parents as a disgrace, since it is the 
appointed purchase of Christian interment for their 
child. The Church has here ordained a struggle be- 
tween veracity and affection ; and who can wonder 
that her minister is used as the tool of falsehood, 
rather than endured as the agent of tyranny ? In 
every direction the signs abound of a disposition, not 
only to retain, but to extend the pressure of Church 
ceremony and dogma upon public institutions and 
private life. "What is the gist of the whole con- 
troversy between the National School Society and 
the Educational Committee of Privy Council about 
the management of parochial schools ? There is no 
question here, as between sect and sect ; for no one 
can belong to the governing board of such school 
without signing a solemn declaration that he is a bo- 
na fide member of the Church of England; but the 
National Society would revive the sacramental test, 
and compel him to qualify by taking the communion 
thrice in the year. There is no question about the 
character of the religious instruction to be given in 
the schools ; for it is consigned to the clergymen of 
the parish, with a final reference to the diocesan, in 
case of any source of grievance or complaint ; and it 
is imperative that, with the Holy Scriptures, the Lit- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 291 

urgy and Catechism of the Established Church shall 
be taught: but the National Society requires that 
the Bishop should be the last appeal on all school 
matters, secular as well as spiritual. In short, the 
Committee of Privy Council, as trustee of the Par- 
liamentary grant, insists on a fair proportion of lay 
influence, of local administration, of secular instruc- 
tion ; the National Society regards as a grievance ev- 
ery thing that threatens clerical ascendency, or raises 
mental culture into independent importance. Not 
to educate, but to restrain education within limits 
suitable to a faith in baptismal regeneration, is the 
almost avowed end: and this end is to be accom- 
plished, if possible, at the public cost, — not out of 
ecclesiastical funds, but from the exchequer of a 
many-faithed and half-dissentient nation. If any 
one is simple enough to doubt the possibility of so 
monstrous a demand, his incredulity will be removed 
by the proceedings of a " meeting of the friends of 
national education on strictly Church principles/' 
held at Willis's rooms, February 7th. On that oc- 
casion, Mr. Napier, M. P., expounded the duty of the 
State, with the peculiar mellifluous modesty which 
finds favor in ecclesiastical assemblies : that duty, he 
said, "resolved itself into the confiding to the accred- 
ited instruments of God the duty of bringing the 
minds of the children of God into harmony with his 
mind and his will." If these terms had less unction, 
they would have more sense. But we can hardly err 
in supposing that the " accredited instruments of 
God " are the gentlemen in holy orders ; that by "his 
mind and his will" are meant " strictly Church princi- 



292 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

pies " ; that " the children of God " are the youth of 
these realms. The speaker, therefore, intimating that 
"the question ought to be easy of settlement," re- 
quires that the whole education of the country be 
delivered over into the hands of the clergy. And 
this he affirms to be, " not preference for the Church, 
but justice " ; declaring the refusal of it by the Privy 
Council to be " an attempt to exclude God from the 
government of the world; to separate Providence 
from man; to set up the wisdom of man against 
God's truth." Is any one so ill-read in ecclesiastical 
history as not to know the savor of this language? 
The tact of our forefathers discovered that a cardi- 
nal's fit of humility, and tears of unusual pathos 
from the servant of all, were the sure prelude to 
some high audacity of the triple crown ; and the tone 
of aggrieved innocence in a church is the common 
disguise of meditated usurpation. The resolution 
which immediately follows Mr. Napier's demand of 
"justice to the Church," throws a further light upon 
the meaning of this plaintive phraseology. It pre- 
fers against the educational Committee of Council 
the complaint, that they " have in their corporate ca- 
pacity no definite creed, but encourage indiscrim- 
inately various and conflicting forms of belief." 
And, in urging this complaint, Mr. G. A. Denison 
ingeniously states the only remedy which the eccle- 
siastical conscience can accept : — 

" The greatest danger of all was the practical negation 
of definite truth which was found so largely in the Church 
itself, from that spirit of compromise which led men, for 
the sake of what they erroneously called peace, to fritter 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 293 

away the objective truth of God ; from that sickly senti- 
ment which made men shrink from unfurling the banner of 
God, because on that banner were written the awful words, 
c This is the catholic faith, w T hich unless man believes he 
cannot be saved.' The effects of this spirit of negation and 
of compromise were not far to seek. The question of ed- 
ucation had been, from the first, between the maintenance 
or the surrender of the creed and doctrines of the church 
catholic, and of the catechism of the Church of England. 
All education flowed from, and necessarily depended upon, 
the doctrine of regeneration in baptism, — that doctrine, 
which had so monstrously been of late made the subject of 
appeal to a court not necessarily composed of churchmen, 
and having necessarily no spiritual character." 

The State, then, acting through the Committee of 
Council, does wrong, — a wrong to the Church, — in 
" encouraging various and conflicting forms of be- 
lief." The " encouragement," however, consists sim- 
ply in letting them alone ; in setting up no inquisi- 
tion into the orthodoxy of the voluntary schools to 
which it renders aid; in not forcing Jewish infants 
to learn the Sermon on the Mount, Presbyterian 
teachers to inculcate episcopal succession, Socinians 
to profess the Athanasian Creed, and Quakers to 
take the Eucharist. The crime of the government 
— the injury it inflicts upon the Church — is in al- 
lowing these heretics to teach any thing at all : they 
should be wholly ignored ; made to pay for the in- 
struction of their neighbors' children — perhaps their 
own — in what is abominable in their eyes ; but be 
left to their native darkness, until they repent of the 
error of their ways. Poor, injured Church ! Was 
25* 



294 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

there ever a harder case ? Was ever innocence so 
buffeted ? How can she discharge her commission 
on these terms ? They are nothing less than an 
Egyptian cruelty, demanding bricks and withholding 
straw. Is she not intrusted with the sacraments, 
without which there is no salvation ? And how can 
she dispense these, and indulge her mercy for im- 
perilled souls, if deluded parents are allowed to ex- 
ercise a vain self-will, and train their children in the 
fatal errors of an unbaptized intelligence? How 
can she be faithful, if sectaries, whom she is bound 
to treat as aliens and pity as apostates, are to be ad- 
mitted as subjects equal under the law? — if she is 
to be responsible to infidel or schismatical legisla- 
tors and their latitudinarian commissions ? — if she 
is not to feel herself above the people's will in her 
use of the people's money, and meet no rival to un- 
do her work in dispensing this world's goods for 
another world's blessings ? It is not possible to mis- 
take the tendency of all this lamentation. The 
plaintiff of this class would be thankful for a discrim- 
inating earthquake, that should swallow up, without 
fault of his, all people who frequent mass-houses 
and conventicles, and get rid of all difficulty, by 
rounding off the nation into the old ecclesiastical in- 
tegrity, paring away the ravelled edges of dissent, 
and leaving the Church smooth and trim as a text- 
ure selvaged every way. Nay, he must be the 
most illogical of men, if he would not contribute, 
by a free use of direct persecution, to the same re- 
sult. If the State is bound to help only the true 
Church, is it not bound to hinder the false ones? 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 295 

Why mulct the dissenter's pocket on behalf of God's 
truth, and leave his person free to propagate a lie ? 
If, according to the doctrine of the Anglican clergy 
and the French police, " the duty of every govern- 
ment is to combat false ideas, and to direct those 
which are true by placing itself boldly at the head of 
them,"* — it is folly to go one-armed into the com- 
bat, brandishing a left-handed encouragement, and 
letting the heavy fist of repression hang down as if 
under the spell of palsy. Unless it can be shown — 
and assuredly it cannot — that the sword and the 
rack are ineffectual for the eradication of sects, the 
same obligation which pledges the public treasure 
pledges no less the penal law to the " definite 
creed " of the government " in its corporate capaci- 
ty." Nor could we ever see any reason, on " Church 
principles," for squeamishness upon the matter. Eter- 
nal consequences must override all the lesser hu- 
manities. You make no scruple about shooting a 
score of mutineers to prevent the disorganization of 
an army : why hesitate to burn up a small sect, to 
stop the perdition of a people ? To believe in the 
necessity of baptism, we are told, is " fundamental- 
ly vital to salvation " ; and hence " all education 
must flow from this doctrine, and the State is bound 
to have it taught to the people. But if salvation 
includes among its conditions a belief in the rite's 
necessity, much more must it involve, as an inner 
nucleus of essentiality, the actual rite itself; and the 
government which is to sanction only baptismal 

* See the Proclamation of M. Carlier, Police Minister, Feb. 10. 



296 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

teaching must a fortiori tolerate only baptismal 
practice. It is absurd to enforce the doctrine and 
not secure the thing. Then why not provide a 
State font at every market cross, and baptize under 
inspection of the police? "Why not enact penal- 
ties against the "pretended holy orders" of dissent- 
ers, by which a spurious and ineffectual imitation 
of the divine charm is palmed off upon simple peo- 
ple ? You punish quacks who destroy life by giving 
medicines which they know not how to handle : 
why not put away heretics who ruin souls by admin- 
istering a rite that turns from a sacrament to a poi- 
son in their hands ? To allow the self-will of parents 
any voice in the matter is the mere imbecility of 
false indulgence. It has for ages been held, that a 
father has no power against the life of his children ; 
it is now generally acknowledged, that he must not 
be at liberty to suppress their intelligence ; and shall 
we leave to him the right to sequestrate their salva- 
tion? To limit by penal law the minor excesses of 
the patria potestas, and refuse a like protection 
against this most tremendous injury, is the grossest 
inconsistency; and it should be made the duty of 
the detective force to ferret out every unbaptized 
child, and take him to the nearest successor of 
the Apostles. These consequences of the " strictly 
Church principle" are so obvious, that, if they are 
not openly mentioned, it can scarcely be that they 
are yet undiscerned. At all events, if our Anglican 
clergy make no immediate proposal to revive the pe- 
nal laws, it is not for want of premises suitable for 
its defence : the requisite logic is ready at a mo- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 297 

merit's notice, and only slumbers within the theory 
till the dawn of some reactionary crisis favors its 
waking into activity. 

It appears to be shocking in the eyes of our spir- 
itual guides that any one but themselves should look 
into the doctrines which they inculcate, — discuss 
them, — do any thing with them but believe them. 
Holy hands are lifted up in horror when such mys- 
teries are approached by the gaze of a layman's un- 
commissioned mind ; and a divine patent is claimed 
not only for dispensing, but for discerning, sacred 
truth. That men like Lord Campbell, accustomed 
only to the rules of profane evidence, should exer- 
cise their judicial understanding upon a sacramental 
proposition, affects the perpetual curate of St. Paul's, 
Knightsbridge, with lively consternation: — 

" At this very instant, one of the vital doctrines of our 
faith is being judged, — is being failed in question, — is be- 
ing argued and delated about, as though it had not been 
the creed of the Catholic Church, known and witnessed to 
from the Apostles downwards. It is being argued, and is 
to be judged, by those who, in good truth, cannot by the 
laws of Christ sit in judgment at all, seeing the laws of 
Christ have given them no such power. 

" How can they judge of Christ's doctrine, who have had 
no commission from Christ ? 

" How can they judge of what is Truth, to whom the 
word of truth has not been committed ? 

" How can they take upon themselves, even for a mo- 
ment, to let the question move past them, as a question, 
who know not that the Foundation of Christianity lies 
in the doctrine which they dare to handle ? 

" It is an awful thing even to be, as we are now, for 



298 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

months in suspense as to what the State may pronounce 
about a doctrine which is fundamentally vital to salva- 
tion. 

"It is an awful thing to see men of a mere temporal 
power dive into the mysteries of the deep things of the 
Spirit. 

" It is an awful thing to see the men of Csesar — as of 
Csesar — plunge so recklessly, and with such utter confusion, 
into the things of God.'" — p. 16. 

This sacerdotal arrogance might be permitted to 
have its way, and spend itself against the energies 
of the age, if it were the outpouring of some pri- 
vate sect, delivered from the pulpit of an oratory, or 
flattering to the owners of an Ebenezer. The vis- 
ions of Swedenborg, the pretensions of Poughkeep- 
sie seers, and the Mormon inspirations of Joe Smith 
the prophet, may be left without remonstrance to 
try their strength upon the ignorance of the age or 
on the permanent tendencies to psychological illu- 
sion. And if any number of Oxford graduates, 
whose heads have been turned with ecclesiology, are 
convinced that they hold the power of the keys, and 
if, by the combined force of bad arguments and 
good works, they can induce country gentlemen and 
suburban shopkeepers to employ them, at their own 
charges, in opening and shutting the kingdom of 
heaven, no one would have the least title to com- 
plain. But when this sort of profession occupies the 
parish church and claims the parish school, when it 
lives upon the farmer's tithe, and grows on chapter 
lands, and thrives with bishops' rents, its proud re- 
pulse to lay investigation becomes ridiculous. It is 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 299 

open to criticism, not from the controversialist only, 
but from the politician. "While every theology is 
exposed to the question, Is it true ? a State Church 
theology is liable to the more practical inquiry, Is it 
adapted to the condition of the national mind ? Does 
it express this people's noblest thought and purest 
aspiration ? Does it stand in sympathy with their 
common affections, yet above their highest culture ? 
These questions a government is bound to ask, and 
public men to urge ; and a Church that cannot 
answer them in good affirmatives, or that will not 
condescend to answer them at all, is disqualified for 
longer occupancy of the national endowment. A 
priesthood which, asserting a Divine commission, 
cannot submit to any lower question than Is it true ? 
nor even to that, except from its own tribunals, so 
that question and answer shall both issue from itself, 
is, ipso facto ) unfit for alliance with the State. The 
temporal powers must estimate the claim by an hum- 
bler rule: "Does our nation think it true?" If the 
reply be negative, lament as we may the perversity 
of human nature, the Church is no better able to 
teach the people than if she were not infallible. 

We are well aware that this is " low Erastian- 
ism " ; we know the kind of feeling with which such 
principles are regarded by divines like Mr. Bennett. 
The argument of his pamphlet, however, has done 
much to confirm us in their truth. He boldly denies 
any obligation on the part of the Church to accept 
or perform conditions imposed by the State ; asserts, 
that it is unfettered by any civil engagements ; is not 
bound, except as a matter of painful necessity, to 



300 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

recognize Parliament at all ; and ought to have all 
the temporalities of an earthly establishment with 
the spiritual absoluteness of a heavenly hierarchy. 
The Church's alliance is not with the State, but 
with the Crown. These positions are made to rest 
entirely on the arbitrary power of the Tudor and 
Stuart monarchs, in whose reigns the Anglican 
Church was constituted, and on the then undeveloped 
state of our representative institutions. At the time 
of the Reformation, and long after, Parliament was 
of no account : its very existence, as a power in the 
State, the Church at its formation never intended to 
recognize. The oath of supremacy was, and is, to 
the sovereign alone; to the sovereign, moreover, not 
as constitutional head of the empire, but as ruling 
by divine right. Churchmen have " the high privi- 
lege and blessing of looking on him as our anointed 
terrestrial governor under Christ." " Thus the case 
stands as between the Church and the sovereign 
ruler ; but between the Church and the State the 
question is entirely different. The sovereign exer- 
cises his office as coming from God, — the State as 
coming from Man. The State is nothing more than 
an incorporation of a legislative, judicial, and execu- 
tive power, appointed, regulated, and changing from 
time to time according to the constitution of a coun- 
try, which in England depends on the will of the 
people, and is not in any way of necessity ecclesias- 
tical." " While adhering to the one as God's ap- 
pointed terrestrial governor, it might be severed from 
the other as being at enmity with God." — p. 7. 
After this profession of anti-state-church loyalty, 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 301 

we had concluded that the "anointed person" might 
rely on Mr. Bennett's implicit obedience ; while an 
heretical Parliament — unless it stopped the mouth 
of its judicial committee — would be in imminent 
danger of losing his services. What was our amaze- 
ment to find, on the one hand, that, on the first sign 
in " God's terrestrial governor " of any deviation (as in 
James the Second's reign) from " true allegiance to the 
Church," he would disobey the crown (p. 10) ; and 
on the other, that, though his " conscience should be 
aggrieved" by "unjust law," and he should feel the 
time come to " obey God rather than man," he could 
never think of resigning his pastoral office on that 
account ; it would be far too cruel to " the little 
ones in Christ," — " the Poor," — whose " faith 
hangs on his; whose dutifulness and adherence to 
the Church depend on his" " He must not dissolve 
that bond that was made for him by the Holy Ghost 
lightly" He must think that it is " the hireling on- 
ly that fleeth, because he careth not for the sheep." 
He must anticipate the question which will be put 
to him at the great day, — " Where is thy flock, thy 
beautiful flock?" (p. 32.) And so, with a bleeding 
conscience, in a Church bereft of catholic truth, the 
preacher proposes to remain " Perpetual Curate of 
St. Paul's, Knightsbridge." 

If, however, he abides by the flock, and acquiesces 
in Parliamentary law, it is more than could fairly be 
expected, and must not be misinterpreted. The 
Church entered into its engagements in the time of 
the Tudors, and has nothing to do with any of the 
follies which society may have committed since. 
26 



302 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

Cranmer having had no notion of the Reform Bill, 
the clergy are not bound to recognize the existing 
legislature ; and Queen Victoria is to them only a 
perpetuation of Henry the Eighth. 

" In regard to thrs point, i. e. that in the reign of Henry the 
Eighth the whole power of the State resided virtually in the 
person of the sovereign, it must be evident that the Church, 
though she embraced (in consideration of an anointed king, 
set over her in the Lord) the idea of obedience to him per- 
sonally under Christ, she never contemplated the possibility 
of the present form of government, by which the sovereign 
personally is of no power whatsoever. 

" Henry the Eighth, and the sovereigns succeeding him, 
were absolute and despotic ; and their own will was sufficient 
argument for acts of power, however arbitrary. Their min- 
isters and their Parliaments were mere shadows. They had 
none of that constitutional strength, by the voice of the peo- 
ple, which now makes them irresistible. By the abdication of 
James the Second, and the introduction of a new family upon 
the throne, opportunity was taken to break down this despotic 
power of the Tudor and Stuart kings. Acts were passed in 
the reign of William the Third, limiting and defining the 
royal prerogative. From that time — the democratic power 
gradually increasing, and the constitution, in every change, 
becoming more of the people and less of the sovereign — 
now it has come to pass that all real government and power 
is lodged, not in the crown, but in the prime minister, — that 
officer of the State becoming so, virtually, by the voice of 
the people. So that now, as in practice we know it is, the 
Church is governed, not as the Church promised she would 
be governed, by the anointed of the Lord, but by the 
voice of some accidental person, whomsoever the convul- 
sions of politics may from time to time cast up into the seat 
of power." — p. 23. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 303 

Now, what would be thought of any other corpo- 
ration, not ecclesiastical, that should reason in this 
way, and not only plead its charter against Parlia- 
ment, but contend that the royal control can only be 
exercised according to the forms and offices of the 
sixteenth century ? Besides, the more absolute the 
monarch to whom the Church pledged her obedience, 
the less questionable his right to delegate his powers 
to whom he will, and distribute to Parliament a share 
of the prerogative once centred in him. And how 
stands the historical fact, as to the alleged submis- 
sion of the Church to the mere person of the sov- 
ereign ? The preamble to the " Act (1st Elizabeth) 
for the Uniformity of Common Prayer and Admin- 
istration of the Sacraments," runs thus : — 

" When, at the death of our late Sovereign Lord King 
Edward the Sixth, there remained one uniform order of 
Common Service and Prayer, and of the Administration of 
Sacraments, Rites, and Ceremonies, in the Church of Eng- 
land, which was set forth in one book, intituled, c The Book 
of Common Prayer, and Administration of Sacraments, and 
other Rites and Ceremonies, in the Church of England, 
authorized by Act of Parliament, holden in the fifth and 
sixth years of our said late Sovereign Lord King Edward 
the Sixth, intituled, An Act for the Uniformity of Common 
Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, the which 
was repealed and taken aioay by Act of Parliament, in the 
first year of the reign of our late Sovereign and Lady Queen 
Mary, to the great decay of the due honor of God, and dis- 
comfort to the professors of the truth of Christ's religion ; 

" Be it therefore enacted by the authority of this present 
Parliament" &c. 



304 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

If the unqualified subservience of the Tudor Par- 
liaments to the royal will be urged against such 
early evidence, we have only to come down to a later 
period, — a period disgraceful indeed in many ways, 
but not without adequate memory and experience 
of Parliamentary power; and in the 14th of Charles 
the Second we have a similar wording in the Bar- 
tholomew Act of Uniformity : — 

u Be it enacted by the King's most excellent Majesty, by 
the advice and with the consent of the Lords Spiritual and 
Temporal, and of the Commons in this present Parliament 
assembled, and by the authority of the same, that all and sin- 
gular ministers, in any Cathedral, collegiate, or parish church 
or chapel, or other place of public worship within this realm 
of England, Dominion of Wales, and Town of Berwick- 
upon-Tweed, shall be bound to say and use the Morning 
Prayer, Evening Prayer, Celebration and Administration of 
both the Sacraments, and all other the Public and Common- 
Prayer, in such order and form as is mentioned in the said 
book, annexed and joined this present Act, and intituled, 
c The Book of Common-Prayer, and Administration of the 
Sacraments,' " &c. 

Here is an act of Parliament, under which the 
prayers are weekly read, and the sacraments admin- 
istered throughout all England ; which introduced 
alterations on the previous forms; which ordained 
the severest penalties against recusant clergymen ; 
and, by enforcement of such penalties, vacated two 
thousand livings, and created the body of Dissenters. 
Yet the Church, we are told, ought to hold on its 
way in sublime unconsciousness of a House of Com- 
mons; conniving perhaps, occasionally, at its exist- 



THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND. 305 

ence, and using, for clerical purposes, " the disagree- 
able truth" that "the real seat of power" lies there; 
but always prepared to fall back upon divine right, 
and disown the constitutional state as a vulgar inno- 
vation. Mr. Bennett himself, in seeking redress for 
what he is pleased to call " the religious disabilities 
of the Church of England," does not deign to speak 
to the High Court of Parliament. He petitions her 
Majesty in person, and prays her to take in hand 
this disagreeable business of dealing with the Houses. 
And what is the message with which he would send 
her Majesty down to St. Stephen's on his behalf? 
Why, to tell the Peers and the Commons, that they, 
" being no longer the Church, but having the Church 
under their dominion, must be demanded to forego 
that dominion as being an unrighteous usurpation ! " 
(p. 27.) A pleasant errand to "the real seat of 
power " ! 

It is a strange infatuation to imagine that English- 
men will ever recognize in their Church an independ- 
ent, self-governing, immutable body, exempt from 
constitutional restraints, and shielded from those 
changes which the progress of knowledge and the 
vicissitudes of thought introduce everywhere else. 
They are not in general very well read in the histo- 
ry of their country ; but every boy, from the upper 
classes of a British or National school, knows enough 
of the course of ecclesiastical affairs during the last 
three centuries, to make the pretensions of the An- 
glican priests to catholic unity appear preposterous. 
Moreover, a claim that might pass without challenge 
when all the religion of the land was centred in one 
26* 



306 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

communion, becomes not only offensive, but intrin- 
sically incredible, when the characteristics of a de- 
vout mind, and the faithfulness of the Christian life, 
present themselves without visible distinction in nu- 
merous churches. A citizen of a large town can 
wander every Sunday into the chapel to hear mass, 
or into the Friends' meeting-house to keep silence, 
or into the Wesleyan, or Independent, or Unitarian 
chapel, to hear in each a different doctrine of nature 
and of grace, expounded perhaps in a manner quite 
as edifying as the rector's. How can you persuade 
that man that Christ has only one church in Eng- 
land? — that the rector is distinguished from all 
these people, as a divine messenger from a set of im- 
postors ? — that he is appointed to open and shut the 
heavenly kingdom, while they are set for a delusion 
and a snare? If you should provoke his sense of 
justice by this style of talk, does he not know that 
Parliament, that once put the Roman Catholics out 
of the parish churches, could put any of these sects 
in? — or could leave each parish as free to choose 
its ministers as its church- wardens ? — or could repeal 
the Act of Uniformity, which deprives the clergyman 
of all power to vary the worship according to his 
own state of mind, or that of his parishioners ? A 
people that have found a new shape for their Parlia- 
ment will not believe their Church inflexible. The 
clergy, who apparently cannot distinguish between 
the permanence of objective truth and the mutabil- 
ity of representative forms and dogmas, will proba- 
bly wait for the painful lessons of experience. But 
other classes, startled by the reappearance of doc- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 



307 



trines worthy of the age of Laud, and discussions in 
the style of Peter Lombard, are meditating the ques- 
tion whether the Church is really fulfilling the under- 
stood conditions of an establishment. This question, 
as now entertained, goes much further, we are con- 
vinced, than it ever has before. It is not a mere 
doubt about patronage and the sale of presentations, 
though that is a thing odious to common sense and 
natural piety; it is not a scruple as to pluralities, 
though custom only can grow tolerant of the abuse ; 
it is not an objection to the incomes of the bishops, 
though they do seem to detach the apostolic func- 
tion from the apostolic lot; it is not a discontent 
with the monopoly of the Universities, galling as 
that is to the intellectual aspirations of dissent ; it is 
not a pity for poor curates, or an aversion to ecclesi- 
astical courts, but the far deeper question whether 
that which the Church teaches can truly be called 
the religion of this nation. Its theory of life, its pic- 
ture of human nature and representations of the di- 
vine, its ideal of moral perfection, its demands on 
intellectual assent, — are they in agreement with the 
living faith, the noblest inspirations, the clearest 
knowledge, and the true heart-worship of the pres- 
ent English people! Or must it be said, that what 
is held true by the best informed rouses the fright- 
ened ecclesiastic instinct; that what the devoutest 
believe is not written in the creed; that what the 
purest and richest souls admire breathes through no 
appointed prayer; and that, in the real doubts and 
strife of their existence, men betake themselves to 
other thoughts than the curate's commonplace ? 



308 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

Recent events, we believe, have awakened thou- 
sands to the consciousness of an alarming interval 
between the dogmatic system of the Church and the 
living spirit of the time; and for one who refers this 
to the degeneracy of the age, there are a hundred who 
regard it as an antiqiiation of the Church. Unhap- 
pily, there is no simultaneous growth of confidence 
in any other denomination, and so the clergy, always 
debarred from ready access to doubting hearts, and 
seeing at present no swarm from their parish pews 
to the conventicle, are blind to the signs of the time. 
They will be the last to know how completely ex- 
ceptional, among their hearers, is any genuine faith 
in the system of doctrine which they teach; — how 
many, with all the tastes and habits of conformity, 
are conscious of an active unbelief, and sigh after 
something of higher truth ; — how many more rath- 
er suffer the service to pass before them, and graze 
the surface of their minds, than take it up as any 
expression of the depth and intensity of their nature. 
The patience of the English race, the endowments 
of the English Church, and the respectable charac- 
ter of the English clergy, only mask for a while the 
fact, conspicuous in the rest of Europe, that the 
Protestantism of the sixteenth century has worn it- 
self out, and gives no adequate voice to the faith 
and piety of the present age. The very difficulty 
felt in dealing plainly with this subject, — the deli- 
cacy with which it is always handled, — the air of 
solemn respect with which public writers look at it, 
and pass by on the other side, — are evident indi- 
cations that a blight of unreality has fallen on the 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 309 

national theology. A faith truly breathing and pul- 
sating in the soul cannot thus hold itself back in in- 
terior congestion, leaving the external form of con- 
temporary thought stately as marble and impassive 
as death ; but will flow into a thousand impressible 
varieties of natural language, and flush the frame 
and quicken the features with a free and flexible life. 
The reverence, the trust, the devout hope of a great 
people, can never fall into the artificial custody of a 
" religious public," or utter themselves only through 
the mouthpiece of a separate " profession." Doc- 
trines which cannot be gravely mentioned without 
incurring the imputation of cant, — which are dis- 
tasteful, not chiefly to the vain and careless, but yet 
more to the thoughtful and earnest, — which no edu- 
cated man, unless he be in orders, can defend with- 
out loss to his reputation, or attack with any gain 
to it, — which leave scarce a trace on the fiction, the 
philosophy, the poetry of the time, and would be si- 
lenced but for special organs which they have cre- 
ated for themselves, — which openly despair of their 
own future, unless they can coerce the popular edu- 
cation, — have manifestly lost their living hold upon 
the minds of men, and are not fit to represent the 
religion of the extant generation. On this point we 
shall discard all conventional fastidiousness, and 
plainly state where we think the Church theory of 
human life stands in hopeless contradiction to the 
wants, the affections, and the henceforth ineradicable 
persuasions of the human soul. 

All men instinctively feel that it is the office of 
religion to draw them upwards by helping the ten- 



310 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

dencies of their purest veneration and their worthiest 
love, by embodying for them what they inwardly 
know to be holiest, and reminding them of what they 
feel to be best. The voice of prophet or of Saviour 
is ever a voice of sympathy and tenderness, — the 
sympathy, indeed, of a higher nature, the tenderness 
of a diviner sphere ; still, however, addressing them, 
not as strangers to whom the idiom of heaven is like 
an unknown tongue, but as kindred in unwilling ex- 
ile, on whose forgetful yet unalienated love the dear 
domestic tones will fall as a music of restoration. 
If it speaks of fears, it is of fears whose shadow is 
already on the heart ; if it denounces guilt, it is a 
guilt that sits invisible as a nightmare on men's 
dreams. It goes, in short, direct down into their 
consciousness, and deals with them as with conge- 
nial beings gifted with a sacred insight which they 
neglect to use. It professes to deposit no sanctity, 
like an incrustation of security, upon them ; but elicits 
it from them, like colors of a native beauty created by 
the touch of light. The Church theology makes no 
such appeal ; talks to men, not of what they ought 
to know, but of what they cannot know ; and makes 
its authority depend, not on its true interpretation of 
the oracles of living souls, but on the pedigree of 
manuscripts, the surmises of tradition, and the slip- 
pery chain of episcopal anointments. Its expound- 
ers assume a station outside the human, and profess 
(like the sophists) a wisdom beyond the apprehen- 
sion of man, [xeifa Tiva rj Kar auBpanrop (rocfriav* ex- 

* Plat. Apol. Socr. 20. D. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 311 

pecting no sympathy from the answering heart, but 
demanding obedience from the submissive mind. 
In their mismanagement — as ever happens when 
prophecy is dead and priesthood lives — Christianity 
becomes a threat; "if you do not use our magic and 
believe our mysteries, l without doubt you shall per- 
ish everlastingly.' " Nor is this the accidental fea- 
ture of some one school of theology ; it is a common 
character in the teachings of Tractarian and of Evan- 
gelical, who may quarrel about the means of grace, 
but can shake hands over the eternal wrath. From 
this the whole economy which they profess to ad- 
minister is nothing but a contrivance for escape. 
This is the fundamental postulate from which the 
whole scheme is developed, which dictates all its 
language and gives meaning to all its forms. The 
charming away of this infinite curse is the very prob- 
lem which the Church proposes to solve, and which 
is held to justify her existence. She is not there to 
make good citizens and good men, to give sanctity 
to the laws of obligation, and hope to sorrow and 
pure affection ; but distinctly to wash out of them a 
physical poison, and save them from the tortures of 
an inexhaustible vengeance. And this tremendous 
end she refuses to accomplish, except on conditions, 
which the wisest may be unable to trust, and the 
most faithful may scruple to accept. For who can 
say that goodness may not doubt the sacraments 
which Clarkson and Elizabeth Fry disowned, and 
purity of heart reject the dogmas which Arnold and 
Channing never held? Either what the Church in- 
sists on as essential are not essentials, and her com- 



312 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

mission to dispense them comes to naught, or some 
of the best of men and most saintly of women are 
among the damned. We question whether any one, 
professing such a faith as this, is to be believed up- 
on his own word. He professes a psychological im- 
possibility. No man, who would himself hesitate to 
put Channing on the wheel, and object to burn Mrs. 
Fry, feeling that his reluctance comes of a good 
heart, can believe that God will do these things on 
a scale more terrible. 

It requires, indeed, no great insight into character 
to discover, that any reality in this eternal curse and 
penalty has for some time ceased. In proposing to 
rescue men from it, the Church makes an offer which 
no one cares to accept. Have our lay readers ever 
practically met with a person, — not under remorse 
for actual and heinous sin, — who wanted to be 
delivered from eternal torment ? If ever a man does 
really apprehend such a thing for himself, and wring 
his hands and fix his eye in wild despair, how do we 
deal with him ? Do we praise the clearness of his 
moral diagnosis and the logic of his orthodoxy ? Do 
we refer him to the font for baptism, or the keys for 
absolution ? No : we send him to the physician 
rather than the priest; we put cold sponges on his 
head, and bid his friends look after him. Nor does 
his doctrine any better bear application to the per- 
sons around us than to ourselves. If we sometimes 
act and speak by it, we never feel, and rarely think 
by it. Who ever knew a mother despair of her un- 
baptized and departed child? Let it only be con- 
sidered what is the scene, what is the perspective, 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 313 

before her imagination, if she be at once sound and 
sincere in the faith ; and it must be owned that even 
her most passionate grief never rises to the pitch of 
such piercing shrieks as she would hurl into the 
place of unutterable agony. The whole conduct and 
demeanor of the very persons who defend this doc- 
trine afford the clearest proof that it is incredible. 
The late Dr. Hamilton, of Leeds, wrote a book to 
prove that, beyond the little circle of choice believers, 
the universe is a vast torture chamber ; and yet a 
merrier laugh, a more exuberant wit, a greater geni- 
ality, was rarely to be found. The professional 
hours of his life were spent, like those of some old 
painters, in coloring lurid pictures of his neighbors 
clutched by devils, and the world in general swal- 
lowing hot pitch ; and for the rest of his time he 
was free to dine with the reprobates, and crack his 
jokes with the damned. No one, who seriously con- 
siders the intense inconsistency involved in such a 
life, can suppose that the theologian really held a 
faith which the grasp of a friendly hand and the 
welcome on a familiar face sufficed to dissipate. It 
is the same throughout the whole class of the sin- 
cerest and most faithful Christians. They delude 
themselves with the mere fancy and image of a be- 
lief. The death of a friend who departs from life in 
heresy affects them precisely in the same way as the 
loss of another whose creed was unimpeachable : 
while the theoretic difference is infinite, the practical 
is virtually nothing, — perhaps a sign of acquiescence 
in the clergyman's official compassion, or a faint de- 
sire that it had been otherwise ; but not half the dis- 
27 



314 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

tress which had been felt when the same friend had 
broken his leg and lost his Pennsylvania dividends. 
What room, indeed, could there be for the business, 
the amusements, the contests of this world, if it re- 
flected from every salient point the red light of so 
horrible a background ? Who could spare any at- 
tention for the vicissitudes of cotton and the price of 
shares, for the merits of the last opera, and the bets 
upon the next election, if the actors in these things 
were really swinging in his eye over such a verge as 
he affects to see ? We would ask any clergyman 
who reads the Athanasian Creed, How can you 
transact your daily affairs with any peace of mind ? 
Your coat was made by a man who doubts the co- 
eternity ; your grocer thinks the Holy Ghost created ; 
you pay your rent to a landlord who confounds the 
persons ; and your fishmonger divides the substance. 
If you found any of these with his house on fire, 
you would not think it a time for prosecuting your 
business ; you see him in a greater peri], and you 
coolly inquire about sugars, or discuss the choice of 
salmon ! The misfortune is, this doctrine is in some 
degree protected by its own monstrous character ; 
which takes it so sheer out of all nature, that it can 
scarcely be confronted with reality. If we apply to 
it such tests of experience as would suffice in other 
cases, we produce results whose startling look dis- 
tracts the attention from their logical consequen- 
tiality ; and when we demand from men a life in 
simple accordance with their profession, the thing 
itself is so impossible that we are apt to seem un- 
reasonable, and become charged with the very ex- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 315 

travagance which we impute. It is, however, no- 
torious that a large number, even of the clergy, are 
fully conscious of their unbelief in this doctrine ; and 
among the educated laity, the impression is general 
that no one, except here and there a dull curate or a 
pugnacious bishop, is sincere in his assent to it. 
Will it not, then, be got rid of? Not a bit : the in- 
stinct of ecclesiastical cohesion, and the passion for 
nominal unity, will outweigh all sense of human ve- 
racity and reverence for godly simplicity ; and year 
after year, as sure as the Athanasian festivals come 
round, thousands of clergymen will solemnly profess, 
before tens of thousands of assenting people, a creed 
which is false to the heart of all. Depend upon it 
the State will wake up to a sense of right and dig- 
nity in this matter before the Church ; and the honor 
of politicians grow sensitive to the blot, while yet 
the conscience of divines could bear a longer shame. 
Now, we need not undertake to decide whether the 
age be perverse, or the doctrines be false. We only 
say that there is an irreconcilable variance between 
them, and that a Church which represents the one 
does not exhibit the religion of the other. It is not 
just, however, to affirm that the modern recoil from 
the stringent forms of the old orthodoxy is the result 
of a light and audacious spirit. On the contrary, it 
manifestly springs, in a large class of cases, from a 
profound moral earnestness. They who are deeply 
impressed with the problems of positive and personal 
sin are not likely to give much heed to the talk of a 
latent birth-sin ; any more than, in the awful crisis 
of a fever, they would consult about the patient's 



316 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

chance of hereditary gout. It is the reality of evil, 
the living sense of moral conflict, which makes faith- 
ful men impatient of charms against a bad lineage, 
instead of help against a strong temptation : what 
care they for the loins of their parents, w T hile the 
battle runs high between the better and the worse in 
their own souls ? Nay, paradoxical as the assertion 
may appear, this deeper feeling of inward strife, 
which marks the age, renders it not more possible, 
but much less, to say much more about the corrup- 
tion of human nature. It has ceased to be a theory, 
scholastically looked at from the outside ; or a senti- 
mental formula, dropping from the lips of nurse- 
maids jilted by their lovers, or squires robbed by 
their butlers. You must touch it with discrimina- 
tion, for its meaning is known ; and with its truth, 
the truth also of its opposite has been discovered. 
It is impossible for a man to find his ill but by the 
perception of good ; to explore his darkness, but by 
an eye of pure vision and a lamp of holy light : he 
cannot loathe the wrong without aspiring to the right, 
nor combat with fiends without the instinct of an 
angel. His self-consciousness necessarily reveals to 
him both halves of his nature at once, and disgusts 
him henceforth with all one-sided doctrines, — wheth- 
er the Church whines to him about human depravity, 
or Socinianism repeats its platitudes on human dig- 
nity. The feeling of the present age demands, we 
are convinced, an observance of this just equilibri- 
um : the dogma must adapt itself to the fulness and 
refinement of modern experience, or pass away as 
the fiction of a world half passionate and half mo- 
nastic. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 317 

The interpretation which thoughtful and devout 
Churchmen have long put on the established forms 
of theological expression must be accepted. By the 
constitutional corruption of man they commonly un- 
derstand no more than the openness to evil which is 
inseparable from a free being, — Bvvafus of sin as op- 
posed to its eVepyeta, — together with that constant 
lagging of the halting will behind the winged desires 
which humbles us to seek the help of God. This is 
no stain which faith can cleanse, or hands, ordained 
to sprinkle, wash away ; but an integrant part of our 
nature, — its peril and its glory, — without which we 
could serve under the bondage of no law, and win 
the freedom of no gospel. And a meaning far dif- 
ferent from the historical definition of divines is cur- 
rently given to the word salvation, — a word, how- 
ever, which, after every softening, is not sincerely 
congenial with the highest religion of the time. Its 
direct opposition to damnation is very much lost ; 
and, instead of denoting mere rescue from a penal 
doom, it is accepted as an expression for personal 
union with God, spiritual perfectness of character; 
or, without reference to any penal alternative, the 
simple attainment of a blessed and immortal state. 
These changes are the inevitable results of more 
humane and more trustful thought, trying to embody 
itself in forms selected by a sterner and a coarser 
time. Let the Church be reconciled to them, and 
adopt them. Though they change the logical basis 
of its theology, they preserve whatever can endure 
in its religion. Nothing is more dangerous to faith, 
more surely fatal in the end, than to press with 
27* 



318 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

rigor the'forms of dogma which have begun to bind 
and hurt the soul. Prove as you may that they 
would sit quite easy but for the perverse writhing 
and resistance within, the band has discovered itself 
to be unyielding, and from that instant it is the very 
function of life to take alarm, and either make it 
pliant or throw it off. It is as if you tried to argue 
back the alienated love of those who once were of 
one heart, but have diverged into uncongenial tastes 
and admirations. The more stringent your demon- 
stration that they ought to feel as of old, the more 
impossible do you make it : your substantial failure 
is proportioned to your formal success. Religion, 
like poetry, is a life, a spirit, that must find its own 
forms by development from within, and cannot be 
moulded by external constriction; and the larger 
freedom you have courage to allow, the less will you 
have to regret irregularity and distortion ; for it has 
inherently a tendency to order and beauty, only de- 
termined, not by authoritative mechanism, but by 
the rhythm and symmetry of the affections them- 
selves. 

Every devout era has been marked by a free en- 
thusiasm, unconscious of reluctant beliefs, or boldly 
disengaging itself from them. From such a time 
the descent to an age of dogmatic construction is 
deep ; to that of dogmatic reconstruction, is final. 
From the period of St. Paul to that of Eusebius, 
what an infinite declension in every thing that should 
be dear to Christian man ! In both, diversity of the- 
ology abounded ; nor in intellectual conception of 
the objects of faith did the rival creeds of subsequent 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 319 

times stand in stronger contrast than the Judaic and 
Gentile Christianities, the doctrines of faith and 
works, the Logos and the Son-of-David theories of 
the Messiah, the Palestinian demonology and Alex- 
andrine spiritualism, which lie harmoniously togeth- 
er within the compass of the New Testament itself. 
No greater difference separated Jerome and Rufinus, 
Theophilus and Chrysostom, Augustine and Pela- 
gius, than is found between the theocratic doctrine 
of Mark's Gospel and the mystic depth of John's ; or 
between James, the apostle of ethics, and St. Paul, 
the champion of faith. But the first age was in- 
spired with intense affections ; the other was with- 
ered up with dry contentions. In the one, Christian- 
ity was a breathing faith ; in the other, a dialectic 
exercise. The one had a creative soul, the other a 
critical understanding; and while the former, rich in 
various populations, out of its differences produced 
unconscious theologies, the latter out of its theol- 
ogies produced only conscious differences. Divisions 
without end, and passions without check, have been 
the invariable result of ecclesiastic legislation for 
unity and peace. It brings with it strong delusion 
and a corrupting poison into the clerical mind ; be- 
wildering its perception of the proportions of things, 
and confounding the solemn and the frivolous ; where 
mystery is deepest, raising highest the conceit of 
knowledge ; where forbearance is most due, remov- 
ing all restraints from anger; where penalty can 
least avail, applying it with cruellest force ; substitut- 
ing the pleader's arts for the disciple's simplicity, 
and the sophist's pride for the saint's meekness. 



320 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

The organization of dogma is symptomatic of the 
dissolution of faith ; it is an unwholesome mushroom 
growth from the rotting leaves now fallen from the 
tree of life. That blessed foliage feeds it, no doubt ; 
only not from the vital sap, but from the juices of 
decay. It is bad enough that the Church should 
have inherited her chief formulas of belief from such 
an age and such a reign as that of Con&tantine; 
a reign hideous with guilt; an age so surrendered to 
depraved morals and misdirected intellect, that, if 
ever there could be in Christendom an incapacity for 
discerning spiritual truth, it must have been then. 
But to make such a time the rule for all others, — to 
dignify by the name of " the Catholic faith " the prop- 
ositions which emerged from its wranglings, by out- 
voting or outreaching the rest ; to scorn, in compar- 
ison, the light of recent thought, and constrain the 
modern Englishman to put back the index of his 
Christian consciousness to the hour when Athanasius 
triumphed, — is a weak rebellion against providential 
tendencies, and an irreligious scepticism of God's 
perpetual inspiration. If, by a liberal interpretation, 
or, better, a complete revision of the technical phrase- 
ology of doctrine, the bands of creed be not relaxed, 
the Church must either descend to the rank of a sect, 
or become a vast hypocrisy ; pretending to unity, yet 
torn by divisions ; representing the faith of the coun- 
try, yet sheltering its unbelief ; the symbol of piety, 
yet a storehouse of unveracity ; the nominal head 
of all our culture, yet sworn to the words of an age 
that had none of it. How long will educated Eng- 
lishmen bear patiently the injurious decree of eccle- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 321 

siastics ? " You shall not be religious, except on 
conditions impossible to the understanding!" It is 
notorious that the present time is prolific beyond all 
that have preceded it in honest varieties of devout 
belief; and for a Church pretending to the affections 
of such a time, and comprising among her honored 
names Sewell and Milman, Hare and Close, to insist 
upon the inflexible standard of doctrine, presents a 
singular aspect of infatuation and insincerity. 

The prevalent alienation from the stereotyped sys- 
tem of Church dogma is by no means confined, we 
believe, to the points on which we have touched. 
Men, we have said, do not want to be "saved" from 
an " eternal torment" which has no hold upon their 
faith ; or to escape, by ritual exorcism, a congenital 
curse which frightens them no more. They do, how- 
ever, want to be helped into a conscious peace with 
God, and a pure fidelity of life. Much as we hear 
from divines of the pride and self-righteousness which 
oppose the reception of their doctrines, and freely as 
we admit the operation of moral causes like these on 
the aptitudes for faith, we deny the general applica- 
bility of this imputation ; and are prepared to vin- 
dicate the humility and devoutness of a large and 
increasing class of doubting and dissatisfied Church- 
men. They are not less sensible than others of the 
delusions of heart and decrepitude of will, by which 
they fall away from the life to which they aspire, 
and in which alone they can be in harmony with 
God; and they have no higher wish than to find a 
mediator of this contradiction, and rise into the free- 
dom of reconciled affections. But the mechanism 



322 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

provided for this end, in the dogmas of the Church, 
has lost its efficacy upon all the higher class of 
minds, and wields no longer any worthy power over 
the lower. The forensic scheme of vicarious atone- 
ment is too probably at variance with the habitual 
moral sentiments of men, to command the old rever- 
ential assent; too manifestly conceived in the arti- 
ficial style of legal fiction, to suit a people ever eager 
to ground themselves on some veracious reality. It 
is useless for the preacher to treat the repugnance of 
reason and affection to this doctrine, as the sign of 
a graceless heart. His hearers know better, and are 
fully conscious that the protest comes not from their 
lower passions, but from their highest discernment ; 
from indignation that the dealings of the Infinite 
should be described in the language of debtor and 
creditor, and the universe, as the theatre of responsi- 
ble existence, be degraded into the likeness of a bank- 
ruptcy court. They feel, moreover, that to accept 
the offer of such a doctrine would be unworthy of a 
noble heart ; for he who would not rather be damned 
than escape through the sufferings of innocence and 
sanctity is so far from the qualifications of a saint, 
that he has not even the magnanimity of Milton's 
fiends. We are spared, however, the necessity of 
stating the objections which we know to be widely 
felt to this doctrine, as it appears in the Church for- 
mulas ; for the following remarks, by an orthodox cler- 
gyman, present them with a force and clearness that 
leave nothing to be desired. The writer divides the 
views prevalent upon this subject into two classes : 
the first representing the death of Christ as a literal 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 323 

substitution of evil endured, for evil that else would 
have to be endured ; the other holding it as an ex- 
pression of abhorrence to sin, made through the suf- 
ferings of one, in place of the same expression that 
was to be made by the suffering of many. In ref- 
erence to the former class of representations he 
says : — 

" We may say, comprehensively, that they are capable, 
one and all, of no light in which they do not even offend 
some right moral sentiment of our being. Indeed, they raise 
up moral objections with such marvellous fecundity, that we 
can hardly state them as fast as they occur to us. 

" Thus, if evil remitted must be repaid by an equivalent, 
what real economy is there in the transaction ? What is 
effected save the transfer of penal evil from the guilty to 
the innocent ? And if the great Redeemer, in the excess 
of his goodness, consents, freely offers himself to the Father, 
or to God, to receive the penal woes of the world in his own 
person, what does it signify, when that offer is accepted, but 
that God will have his modicum of suffering somehow, if 
he lets the guilty go, — will yet satisfy himself out of the 
innocent? In which the divine government, instead of 
clearing itself, assumes the double ignominy, first, of letting 
the guilty go, and secondly, of accepting the sufferings of 
innocence ! In which Calvin, seeing no difficulty, is still 
able to say, when arguing for Christ's three days in hell, ' it 
was requisite that he should feel the severity of the divine 
vengeance, in order to appease the wrath of God, and satisfy 
his justice.' I confess my inability to read this kind of 
language without a sensation of horror; for it is not the 
half-poetic, popular language of Scripture, but the cool, 
speculative language of theory, as concerned with the rea- 
son of God's penal distributions. 



324 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

"And yet this objection is aggravated, if possible, by 
another representation, that Christ did not suffer willingly, 
or by consent, save in the sense that he obeyed the com- 
mand by which it was laid upon him to suffer. Thus, a 
distinguished American writer, in his treatise on this sub- 
ject, written only thirty years ago, says, c The Father 
must command him to die, or the stroke would not be from 
his own hand,' carrying still the analogy of punishment so 
far as to suppose that, like all penal inflictions, Christ must 
die under ' authority ' of God, in order that his death should 
have any theologic value. It is of no moment to ask, in 
this connection, what becomes of the deity of the Son, 
when he is thus under the authority of the Father ; for he 
is not merely under it, as being in the flesh, as the Scrip- 
tures speak, but it is c authority ' that sends him into the 
flesh. To profess the real and proper deity of Christ, in 
such a connection, is only to use words as instruments of 
self-deception. His deity, after all, is not believed, and 
cannot be where such a doctrine is held. 

" Again, it is a fatal objection to this view, that it sets 
every transgressor right before the law, when, as yet, there 
is nothing right in his character ; producing, if we view it 
constructively, and not historically (for historic and specu- 
lative results do not always agree), the worst conceivable 
form of licentiousness. For if the terms of the law are 
satisfied, the transgressor has it for his right to go free, 
whether he forsake his transgressions or not. As far as 
any mere claims of law or justice are concerned, he may 
challenge impunity for all the wrongs he has committed, 
shall commit, or can commit while his breath remains ! " * 



* God in Christ. Three Discourses, delivered at New Haven, 
Cambridge, and Andover, with a Preliminary Dissertation on Lan- 
guage. By Horace Bushnell. (Hartford, Connecticut, 1849.) p. 195. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 325 

In such trenchant manner does a Presbyterian di- 
vine, in a book written to defend the Trinitarian 
theology, deal with the favorite Evangelical topic. 
We do not profess, with our Boeotian apprehension 
of dogmatic subtilties, to perceive the essential dis- 
tinction between the opinion thus criticized and 
what he calls " the second and more mitigated class 
of orthodox opinions," namely, those which make 
the efficacy of Christ's death consist, not in what it 
is, but in what it expresses. Between a substituted 
" punishment," and a substituted " expression of ab- 
horrence for sin," we can find nothing but a verbal 
difference; seeing that only by being punishment 
would it express any thing against sin, or replace as 
a substitute, with equivalent functions, the great pe- 
nal scene of the universe. We suppose, however, 
that a practised theological vision can detect some 
valid distinction where it evades the ordinary eye- 
sight. Dr. Bushnell, while paying a higher respect 
to the second hypothesis, visits it, notwithstanding, 
with the following decisive judgment : — 

" This latter seems to accord with the former view, in 
supposing that Christ suffers evil as evil, or as a penal visi- 
tation of God's justice, only doing it in a less painful de- 
gree ; that is, suffering so much of evil as will suffice, con- 
sidering the dignity of his person, to express the same 
amount of abhorrence to sin that would be expressed by the 
eternal punishment of all mankind. I confess my inability 
to see how an innocent being could ever be set, even for 
one moment, in an attitude of displeasure under God. If 
He could lay his frown for one moment on the soul of inno- 
cence and virtue, He must be no such being as I have loved 
28 



326 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

and worshipped. Much less can I imagine that He should 
lay it on the head of one whose nature is itself coequal 
Deity. Does any one say that He will do it for public gov- 
ernmental reasons ? No governmental reasons, I answer, 
can justify even the admission of innocence into a participa- 
tion of frowns and penal distributions. If consenting in- 
nocence says, c Let the blow fall on me,' precisely there is it 
for a government to prove its justice, even to the point of 
sublimity ; to reveal the essential, eternal, unmitigable dis- 
tinction it holds between innocence and sin, by declaring 
that, as under law and its distributions, it is even impossi- 
ble to suffer any commutation, any the least confusion of 
places. 

" All the analogies invented or brought from actual his- 
tory to clear the point are manifestly worthless. If Zaleu- 
cus, for example, instead of enforcing the statute against 
his son which required the destruction of both his eyes, 
thinks to satisfy the law by putting out one of his own eyes 
and one of his son's, he only practises a very unintelligent 
fraud upon the law, under pretext of a conscientiously lit- 
eral enforcement of it. The statute did not require the loss 
of two eyes ; if it had, the two eyes of a dog would have 
sufficed ; but it required the two eyes of a criminal, — that 
he, as a wrongdoer, should be put into darkness. If the 
father had consented to have both his own eyes put out in- 
stead of his son's, it might have been very kind of him ; 
but to speak of it as public justice, or as any proper vindi- 
cation of law, would be impossible. The real truth signi- 
fied would be, that Zaleucus loved public justice too little, in 
comparison with his exceeding fondness for his son, to let 
the law have its course ; and yet, as if the law stood upon 
getting two eyes, apart from all justice, had too many scru- 
ples to release the sin, without losing the two eyes of the 
body, as before he had lost the eyes of his reason. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 327 

"According to the supposition, the problem here is to 
produce an expression of abhorrence to sin, through the suf- 
ferings of Christ, in place of another, through the suffer- 
ings of the guilty. Now the truth of the latter expression 
consists in the fact, that there is an abhorrence in God to 
be expressed. But there is no such abhorrence in God 
towards Christ; and therefore, if the external expression of 
Christ's sufferings has no correspondent feeling to be ex- 
pressed, where lies the truth of the expression ? And if 
the frown of God lies upon his soul, as we often hear, in 
the garden and on the cross, how can the frown of God, 
falling on the soul of innocence, express any truth or any 
feeling of justice ? " * 

After such a verdict as this, pronounced by an or- 
thodox divine, distinguished alike by genius and 
moderation, who can wonder at the aversion with 
which noble and cultivated minds recoil from the 
so-called " economy of salvation " ? Of the feeling 
which its technical phraseology produces, the acute 
and refined Tractarian leaders are well aware ; and 
one of their earliest aims was to withdraw this doc- 
trine from open publication, under pretence that it 
was too sacred a mystery to be more than whispered 
in the sanctuary. If it was obtruded upon unpre- 
pared minds, it was said, it might be extremely dan- 
gerous ; for the secret treasures of God were not al- 
ways to be shown; a vain display of them before 
the eye of the unregenerate might have serious con- 
sequences; all holy things, in proportion as they 
were springs of life to the faithful, were of awful 

• See " Tracts for the Times," Nos. 80 and 87, especially Part V. 
sec. 3. 



328 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

peril to the unprepared. Better would it be if the 
"stewards of the mysteries" would reserve this 
truth deeply in the shade, and adopt respecting it 
the " disciplina arcanl" What could be more covert 
than our Lord's own dealing with it? Is it not a la- 
tent presence in his teachings, never prominently and 
explicitly declared ? And it is ever most effectual- 
ly impressed on others by silent implication, and the 
"instruction of a penitent and merciful demeanor," 
rather than by being "proclaimed, as it were, in the 
market-place," and opened to all indiscriminately.* 
Now, let it be remembered whence this curious 
pleading comes; and that all the writings of its 
class must be read shrewdly, like a paper from the 
foreign office ; for the Tractarians, as God's ambas- 
sadors at the court of Human Nature, have intro- 
duced a most diplomatic spirit into the divinity pro- 
pounded there : let this be remembered, and the real 
motive for converting the warmth of the atonement 
doctrine into a latent heat will not be far to seek, 
Left to radiate at large, it produced a shrinking of 
the mind, a withering sense of blight to the moral 
sentiments, which endangered the whole Church 
scheme ; and if any lofty and tender souls were to 
be retained in allegiance to it at all, this dogma 
must be taken out of the mouth of popular declaim- 
ers, thrown back into secrecy, and committed to 
sacraments of solemn look and silent form. 

In rebuking this Jesuitry, the Evangelical clergy 
have certainly all the honesty on their side. But in 

* Bushnell, p. 199. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 329 

practising it, the Tractarians rightly interpret, we 
believe, the alienated feelings of a class of men, 
without whose sympathy and convictions no Church 
can remain rational, no theology respectable, and no 
religion above the taint of gross superstition. There 
is no way, however, of preserving or of recovering 
their sympathy, or any sympathy by which religion 
can profit, but by perfect simplicity and truth.' No 
management, no suppression, can serve the end ; the 
guilt and discredit of artifice are spent only in the 
purchase of failure. It is not by manoeuvring peo- 
ple back into persuasions from which they have in 
heart emerged, but by urging the Church forward, to 
comprehend and interpret their ennobled affections, 
that the forfeited harmony can be restored. The 
shadow on the dial of history cannot be coaxed 
back. Lost positions in the movements of the hu- 
man mind are never recovered, and in the oscilla- 
tions of faith no reaction ever touches the old points 
and reproduces the same attitudes of thought. The 
same subjective tendency may undoubtedly recur 
after long sleep, but it finds a new set of objective 
conditions forbidding the re-creation of the past ; as 
a south wind that has blown in spring may set in 
again with the late summer ; but, as it falls on a dif- 
ferent season, it will open a fresh set of flowers. 
No doubt the recoil from the Protestant integration 
of Churches has impressed upon the present age a 
Catholic aspiration; an admiration for the unity 
which we have lost. But this feeling is simply in- 
sulted by offering to its imitation the mediaeval Ro- 
manism. Aspiration cannot imitate ; it must cre- 
28* 



330 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

ate ; and whatever unity may yet arise in Christen- 
dom will be no less different from any thing we have 
yet known than the factory from the monastery, the 
locomotive from the packhorse, or the Times news- 
paper from the illuminated manuscript. Above all, 
fellowship must be sought, not by exclusion, but by 
inclusion; not by enforcement of dogma, but by 
sympathy of spirit; not by suppression of individu- 
ality, but by development of it, till its contrarieties 
drop away, and it yields up Catholicity of faith as a 
product of unity of nature. The " bond of the spir- 
it" sufficed, without metaphysical definitions, for 
the disciples in the age of the Apostles; and every 
Church which fears to trust its guidance is self-con- 
victed of being non-apostolic. 

Perhaps the most positive divergence of the age 
from the Church is to be traced in their irreconcila- 
ble notions of what is best in human character. 
Their admirations are not simply different, but op- 
posite. The life which appears noble and great to 
the mechanic, the merchant, the statesman, is un- 
holy in sacerdotal eyes; the heroes of modern fic- 
tion and biography are unconsecrate according to 
the measure of theology; and against that which 
the newspaper praises the sermon lifts its voice. 
Nor is this discordance at all concurrent with the 
old quarrel between " flesh and spirit " ; the low, self- 
seeking desires, and the reverent faithfulness of the 
human heart. It is an honest and an earnest differ- 
ence in the moral tastes and standard of the devout 
ecclesiastic and the devout layman. If a Massillon 
or a Barrow denounced from the pulpit the corrup- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 331 

tions of his age, the rake and the hypocrite who lis- 
tened were either pricked in conscience at his words, 
or else aware of being too far gone for scruple and 
contrition. But the modern invectives against the 
world and its ways carry with them no piercing re- 
proach ; the state of mind extolled as spiritual is felt 
to be only ecclesiastical : it kindles no affection, 
rouses no sacred ambition ; at best, it is only looked 
at from without as a quaint old picture, romantic to 
see on the dead wall of time, and no man is eager 
to present himself in its likeness on the Exchange or 
St. Stephen's. We have reached a time when the 
broad chasm between the Church and the world can- 
not be kept open ; and we must have something to 
mediate between the natural conscience and the 
Christian life. The theory which entirely removes 
Christianity from contact and sympathy with the 
common springs of human action and movements of 
human affection, — which treats it as a hypernatu- 
ral grace superinduced from without, — necessarily 
creates a type of unnatural and unmoral goodness, 
incapable of being sustained in the permanent ad- 
miration of mankind ; and then the Church, while 
abandoning in despair, as a piece of doomed corrup- 
tion, the real and living nature which to a pure cul- 
ture would yield the noblest fruits, fails to impart 
any better inspiration. 

Whoever persuades himself that, in the awards of 
another world, there are to be two grand classes, 
separated by all that can render contrast terrible, 
and that already, as they walk the streets, men bear 
upon them the sealing grace or the cursing brand, 



332 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

will not be content to see them look so like each 
other. He will ignore the visible lights and shades 
of genuine character, to dwell upon mystic and view- 
less distinctions. Religion is not equivalent with 
him to a pure mind and an harmonious character, 
and may even tend to distort the conscience and 
misapply the energy of the will. It sets itself up, 
apart from morals, as a separate business, involving 
a distinct series of acts, and rather eclipsing all finite 
relations than glorifying them to infinitude. The 
heavenly frame of soul which must be sought is not 
simply the best and highest spirit applicable to the 
worldly work of the hour, but something above all 
worldly work ; something that feels the very contact 
of such affairs as a mean distraction, and that aims 
to sit aloof from them in higher contemplations. 
The one thing needful in its estimate is, to keep up 
in the mind, in a state of vivid excitement, a certain 
limited set of thoughts and emotions, which are 
taken as signs of communion with the Spirit. The 
great business of life is to perpetuate, not the uncon- 
scious influence, but the conscious presence, of these 
sentiments ; whatever suffers, they must be watched, 
preserved, stimulated to greater intensity ; every thing 
is valued solely by its tendency to suggest these 
ideas, or to burnish them again when they have be- 
come dull within the heart. This is adopted as the 
test of right and wrong; and the most injudicious 
efforts of zeal are approved, if they do but deepen 
the essential sentiments : while no employment of 
the understanding can be so noble, no sympathy so 
pure, no pleasure so innocent, no duty so worthy of 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, 333 

our humanity, as to escape condemnation, if it tend 
to withdraw the mind from its prescribed medita- 
tions, and melt its rigid catalepsy of thought. Hence 
the first place in the rank of obligations is given to 
acts of devotion ; and the devotee lives that he may 
learn to pray, instead of praying that he may learn 
to live. The excitement of the Church becomes 
more welcome than the drudgery of the home ; a 
higher relish is found in a transport than in a duty ; 
the simple pleasure, the unpretending moralities, the 
secular utilities of life, let down the mind to a pitch 
too low for saintship ; and those who cannot always 
be strung up to the spiritual point, but who are care- 
ful to do the duty that lies nearest to them ; those 
who, by the spontaneity of a pure conscience, do 
good without a thought of self, and give the cup of 
cold water, not in order to be divinely meek, but in 
order to assuage a human suffering; those whore- 
fresh family and neighbors by the perennial flow of 
delicious sympathies, without knowing that they 
have any themselves, — encounter the contempt of 
these peculiar people of God. Detaching religion 
from morality, they concentrate their whole anxiety 
on the performance of acts having exclusive refer- 
ence to God, and an abstinence from others which 
have no further guilt than that of preoccupying the 
mind, which is to be left vacant as his temple. 

In the highest minds religion has no separate du- 
ties of its own, but is the spirit which should impreg- 
nate all duty : it changes the direction of no obliga- 
tion, but gives intensity to the force of all : it has no 
rivalry with any pure affection, but befriends and 



334 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

consecrates them all. Under its influence, therefore, 
life is not essentially changed in character, but sim- 
ply hopes more, loves more, aspires more. This 
view alone can save religion from degenerating into 
morbidness and superstition ; but it arranges men 
too much by the natural groupings of character, and 
melts away too completely the great eternal classifi- 
cation, to suit the priesthood intrusted with the 
power of the keys. The Church is committed to a 
Manichean theory of the phenomena of life, and 
binds herself to detect in it only the struggle of ex- 
treme and absolutely hostile principles. Total spir- 
itual night, and supernatural illumination, divide this 
scene of things between them ; and to give some 
semblance of probability to this, a badge-morality 
must be set up, that it may be clear who 's who. 
The notion that they are living in a lost world visi- 
bly influences the moral judgments of divines. They 
are bound to find " the world " guilty, and see it un- 
der an aspect of indiscriminate condemnation. Hence 
amusements, occupations, habits, beliefs, are con- 
demned, not for their intrinsic demerits, but simply 
because they are favorites with a class prejudged as 
unconverted. What these children of perdition do, 
the heirs of grace make a point of avoiding; and 
where the worldly go, the holy stay away ; or if they 
happen to meet in any scene which the former en- 
joy, the latter will be found to be groaning in spirit. 
Contrast and distinction thus become prime essen- 
tials with those who fancy themselves secretly 
marked out from the sinful herd with whom their 
lot is thrown ; and were there no world to inveigh 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 335 

against and shun, one half the rules by which they 
speak and live would disappear. 

This contrast of character between the world and 
the Church has not always, we confess, been as un- 
real as it has now become. Usurping a place in 
Christianity among the theocratic ideas which cor- 
rupted the religion almost from the first, it operated 
largely on history, and tended to realize itself. Un- 
der certain conditions, moreover, society inclines, by 
natural law, to part into extremes. The ideal of 
Christian perfection, once given to the mind, could 
not live in the close presence of a universal corrup- 
tion of morals, such as spread over the Roman em- 
pire in its decline; and to fly from such a world 
seemed the sole resource for those who would be 
faithful to the vows and hopes of their discipleship. 
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the whole as- 
pect of Europe supported, by its opposite coloring, 
the theory of a secular and a spiritual race coexist- 
ing on this earth. The face of every country was 
dotted over with castles as the symbols of the one, 
and abbeys as the other ; and on the roads, the helm 
and sword, or the cowl and staff, showed at once the 
traveller's class. Nor, with all the vices of the mo- 
nastic system, was the external and assumed distinc- 
tion entirely deceptive. One difference of character, 
at all events, never failed ; the world was a camp, 
the abbey a sanctuary ; the one contested at all 
points by men of war, the other occupied by disci- 
ples of the Prince of Peace. But besides this, the 
state of manners among the nobles and gentry, the 
cruelties and treachery which marked their feuds, 



336 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

the oppression with which they treated their serfs, 
the riot and excess which disgraced their dwellings, 
turned many a province into a plausible likeness to 
some devil's realm, and rendered it scarce habitable 
by any but rude and untamed spirits. And so the 
gentle and devout were driven, by the mere repul- 
sion of such a scene, to take the vows of poverty and 
celibacy. Though weakness and incapacity also 
were forced, by greedy relatives, into the cloister; 
and though the retreat inevitably degenerated often 
into a hiding-place of idleness and hypocrisy; yet 
whatever divine enthusiasm seized anywhere upon 
the souls of men sought a refuge there; whatever 
declension might afterwards creep on, at least the 
moment of entrance was warm with the fresh fervor 
of devotion : and that was the moment when the eye 
of spectators, bidding adieu to the young devotee, 
caught the contrasted glimpse of the world and the 
Church. Time after time, the convent door seemed 
to close behind some soul purely consecrate to 
Christ. In that age, therefore, there was little to 
contradict the Church classification: as in heaven, 
so on earth, were the spheres of character distinct ; 
and to the opposite directions were qualities truly 
opposite attracted. When all the business and en- 
terprise of life was of a kind that a pious Christian 
could not touch, it was excusable in him to fly, and, 
in the absence of all worthy scope for human facul- 
ty, make a business of religion. 

But what can be more preposterous than to ex- 
hibit this type of mind as a model for the emulation 
of the present age ? — as if we had no more natural 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 337 

gymnastics for the character than were furnished in 
the objectless life of the monk ; no temptations with- 
out meeting with devils in a wood ; no self-denials 
without pricking our waists with sharp chain-belts, 
or mimicking with piercing hats the crown of thorns ! 
Yet, to reawaken the English admiration for this as- 
cetic discipline, the " Lives of the Saints " are avow- 
edly written ; to induce converted bankers to quit 
Lombard Street for a life of contemplation, to incline 
cotton-spinners to recite the Psalter every day, and 
bring Sir Robert Peel down to the house in a hair 
shirt. 

These books are to us in the highest degree mel- 
ancholy ; not the less so for their singular beauty and 
fascination. Their subtle grace of form and style, 
their frequent depth and delicacy of expression, are 
the fair disguise of a fatal unsoundness ; their bril- 
liant and romantic coloring is but the sad hectic of 
the spirit. Their whole aim is to recommend, not 
self-devotion to high ends, but a species of suicide for 
Christ's sake; the quenching of passion, the abro- 
gation of intellect, and the plucking up of the fairest 
human affections, to be trampled on as weeds. The 
intensest forces of the soul are to be spent in noth- 
ing else than in crushing themselves ; and when 
beauty has made itself hideous, and eloquence learned 
to stammer, and acuteness blunted its edge against 
holy contradictions, and creative genius brought it- 
self to do nothing, and he who. might rule an empire 
sweeps a drain, — then is the sacrifice complete, and 
the whole nature thus ruined is said to be dedicate 
to God. As if He were a great devouring abyss of 
29 



338 



MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 



annihilation, demanding to be fed by the everlasting 
consumption of whatever is lovely and glorious ; and 
stationing men here only to watch every grace and 
power as it emerged into life, and instantly pitch it 
back again into death. 

In no instance is the extravagance of this doctrine 
more strikingly presented than in the sketch of St. 
Bernard, contained in the Life of St. Stephen, Abbot 
of Citeaux. This poor monastery, the birthplace 
of the Cistercian order, was distinguished by its 
severity of discipline. For fourteen years it had ex- 
isted without drawing to it any new inmates to re- 
place the original fraternity as death thinned their 
numbers ; and already the life of unprofitable pain, 
and an atmosphere of wood and swamp, had made 
great havoc with the little band. Amid these dis- 
couragements, however, the lonely place was one 
day startled by the knocking at the gate of thirty 
men, who applied in a body for admission as nov- 
ices. This group, composed of men from the no- 
blest houses of Burgundy, was gathered around the 
person and under the lead of the young and high- 
born Bernard. The saint's graces of countenance 
and soul, the sweetness of his eloquence, the quick- 
ness of his intellect, are described by the author with 
the fervor of a manifest sympathy. The enthusiasm 
of the youth was not content with the sacrifice of 
himself ; but he set himself to drag all his relations 
with him into the cloister. And he succeeded. 
Genius, kindled by the consciousness of high resolve, 
has vast power; and Bernard combined, in utmost 
perfection, all the qualities before which lower minds, 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 339 

in spite of their rude stubbornness of will, are found 
to bend and yield ; like iron that resists an outer 
pressure, but grows pliant with inner heat. His 
burning words and indomitable zeal carried off into 
monastic captivity his five brothers, who left their 
old father " to sit alone in his deserted halls with his 
daughter Humbeline," "a barren trunk, with the 
choice boughs lopped off" ; besides an uncle and 
many friends, torn not from estates and possessions 
merely, but often from their wives, whom Bernard 
persuaded or terrified into consent and the widow- 
hood of a nunnery. Our biographer does not shrink 
from the protest which affection and conscience utter 
against this frightful fanaticism. "Whether his replies 
are satisfactory to faith, we cannot presume to say ; 
but assuredly they are not convincing to reason ; in- 
deed, so fine and feminine are they, that they can be 
called answers only by a species of logical gallantry. 

u Now, it may be asked, that Stephen has housed his 
thirty novices, what has he or any one else gained by it ? — 
what equivalent is gained for all these ties rudely rent, — 
for all these bleeding hearts torn asunder, and carrying 
their wounds unhealed into the cloister ? Would not rus- 
tics suit Stephen's case well, if he would cultivate a marsh 
in an old wood, without desolating the hearths of the no- 
blest houses in Burgundy ? Human feeling revolts, when 
high nobles, with their steel helmets, shining hauberks, and 
painted surcoats, are levelled with the commonest tillers of 
the soil ; and even feelings of pity arise when high-born 
dames, clad in minever and blazing with jewels, cast all 
aside for the rough sackcloth and the poor serge of St. Ben- 
edict. What, shall we say when young mothers quit their 
husbands and their families, to bury themselves in a clois- 



340 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

ter ? There are here no painted windows and golden 
candlesticks, with chasubles of white and gold to help out 
the illusion ; feeling and imagination, all are shocked alike, 
and every faculty of the natural man is jarred at once at 
the thought. Such words might have been spoken even in 
Stephen's time, but ' wisdom is justified of her children.' 
One word suffices to silence all these murmurers ; Ecce 
homo, — Behold the man ! The wonders of the incarna- 
tion are an answer to all cavils. Why, it may as well be 
asked, did our blessed Lord choose to be a poor man, in- 
stead of being clothed in purple and fine linen ? — why 
was His mother a poor virgin ? — why was He born in an 
inn, and laid in a manger ? — why did He leave his blessed 
mother, and almost repulse her, when she would speak to 
Him ? — why was that mother's soul pierced with agony 
at the sufferings of her divine Son ? — why, when one drop 
of His precious blood would have healed the whole creation, 
did He pour it all out for us ? — in a word, why, when He 
might have died (if it be not wrong to say so) what the 
world calls a glorious death, did He choose out the most 
shameful, besides heaping to Himself every form of insult, 
and pain of body and soul ? He did all this to show us that 
suffering was now to be the natural state of the new man, 
just as pleasure is the natural state of the old. Suffering 
and humiliation are the proper weapons of the Christian, 
precisely in the same way that independence, unbounded 
dominion and power, are the instruments of the greatness 
of the world. No one can see how all this acts to bring 
about the final triumph of good over evil ; it requires faith, 
but so does the spectacle of our blessed Lord naked on the 
cross, with St. Mary and St. John weeping on each side. 
After casting our eyes on the holy rood, does it never occur 
to us to wonder how it can be possible to be saved in the 
midst of the endearments of a family and the joys of do- 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 341 

mestic life ? God forbid that any one should deny the pos- 
sibility ! — but does it not at first sight require proof, that 
heaven can be won by a life spent in this quiet way ? 
Again, let us consider the dreadful nature of sin, even of 
what are called the least sins, and would not any one wish 
to cast in his lot with Stephen, and wash them away by con- 
tinual penance ? Now, if what has been said is not enough 
to reconcile the reader's mind to their leaving their father 
in a body, which looks like quitting a positive duty, it should 
be considered that they believed themselves to be acting 
under the special direction of God. Miracles were really 
wrought to beckon them on ; at least, they were firmly con- 
vinced of the truth of those miracles, which is enough for 
our purpose ; and they would have disobeyed what they con- 
sidered to be God's guidance, if they had remained in the 
world. Miracles, indeed, cannot be pleaded to the revers- 
ing of commands of the Decalogue -, but persons leave their 
parents for causes which do not involve religion at all, as 
to follow some profession in a distant quarter of the globe, 
or to marry ; and we may surely excuse St. Bernard and 
his brothers for conduct which was so amply justified by the 
event. One word more : every one will allow that he who 
is continually meditating on heaven and heavenly things, 
and ever has his conversation in heaven, where Christ is sit- 
ting at the right hand of God, is more perfect than he who 
is always thinking on worldly affairs. Let no one say that 
this perfection is ideal, for it is a mere fact that it has been 
attained. Stephen and Bernard, and ten thousand other 
saints, have won this perfection, and it may be it is won 
now, for the Church verily is not dead, nor have the gates 
of hell prevailed against her. All cannot attain to such a 
high state on earth, for it is not the vocation of all. It was, 
however, plainly God's will, that all Bernard's convertites 
should be so called, from the fact of their having attained 
29* 



342 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

to that state of perfection. They were happy, for to them 
it was given not to fear those words of our Lord, ' Whoso- 
ever loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of 
me ' ; or again, that saying, spoken to one who asked to go 
and bury his father, ; Let the dead bury the dead.' More- 
over, they knew that blessing, c Verily I say unto you, 
There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, 
or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my 
sake and the Gospel's, but he shall receive an hundred-fold 
now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and 
mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions ; and 
in the world to come eternal life.' Bernard did receive 
back both father and sister, for his father died in his arms 
a monk at Clairvaux, and his sister also in time retired to a 
cloister. Let any one read St. Bernard's sermons on the 
Song of Solomon, and he will not doubt that monks have 
joys of their own, which none but those who have felt them 
can comprehend." — pp. 113 - 115. 

To unravel the complex web of this dialetic is the 
less needful, because it is, in its very nature, of that 
delicate kind that no mind can be held entangled 
in it, except by spontaneously resting beneath it, 
pleased with the feel of it on the surface of thought. 
Besides, who can untwine the windings of a gossa- 
mer, thrown with its dewdrops on his reason? It 
breaks in the attempt ; and, to be rid of it, the only 
way is to wipe it off. As to the argument, however, 
from the incarnation, which is to be good against all 
cavils, we would ask, — Is it then true that the Re- 
deemer might have saved the world at much less 
cost? — and was a portion of his suffering absolute- 
ly gratuitous ? — can his example be quoted in favor 
of the assumption of pain for its own sake? We 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 343 

had always thought that, "when he was rich," it 
was "for our sokes that he became poor " ; and if 
any of his privations were unrelated to an end, why 
not all? 

Again, it is an abuse of all reasonable doctrine of 
self-denial, to pronounce that " suffering and humil- 
iation " are the proper weapons of the Christian, just 
as independence, dominion, and power. " Suffering 
and humiliation " are mere negations, productive 
of nothing, conquering nothing in and by them- 
selves : they do not stand related to the ends of the 
Christian life as power to the ends of the worldly 
life; for power achieves its purposes, whatever be 
the quality of the will that guides it ; but suffering 
achieves nothing, apart from the spirit that bows un- 
der it and interprets it : else might a man be saved 
by a toothache or a bankruptcy. It is easy to see 
the source whence this exaggeration springs. The 
genuine moral service laid upon us in this world can- 
not be accomplished without the endurance of hard- 
ship and privation ; and he who cannot dispense 
with his ease and indulgences, and go fasting long 
months or years without the taste of them, is no 
faithful vassal of the Divine Power that rules him. 
There is danger lest he shrink from the post of allot- 
ted trial, and the spectacle of privation drive him 
back from his fidelity. This danger must be provid- 
ed against by devotedness and resolve ; suffering 
must be so vanquished as to be no hinderance, and 
impose no limits to the perseverance of high affec- 
tions. But a positive help, an efficacious instru- 
ment, of noble purposes, it cannot be ; for what 



344 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

moral, what spiritual character, can there be in tor- 
tured nerves or a lacerated skin ? What sanctity in 
having the body brought low, — for does not the 
spent voluptuary, as well as the fasting saint, 
accomplish that? Suffering and humiliation are 
indeed conditions, under which a good man must be 
willing that his moral purposes and vows shall act 
without abatement or recoil ; but in those purposes, 
with the sustaining help of Heaven, lie his power- 
there alone is the armory whence he draws the 
" weapons " of his conquest. No doubt, the appa- 
rition of a sudden difficulty, the threat of a great 
peril, nay, even the tension of some terrible anguish, 
will condense, as it were, the energies of a strong 
soul, and bring them to a pitch of sublimity impos- 
sible to mere volition : but only on this condition, 
that the suffering be involuntary, starting up as a 
resistance to be hurled away, not sought as an end 
to be retained. At once to court and to repel resist- 
ance involves a self-neutralizing action of the soul, 
inconsistent alike with its force and its repose. 

It remains to be proved, says our author, with evi- 
dent inclination to the negative, whether a married 
man or woman can be saved ! Is the doubt serious ? 
What a cheerful prospect must his faith open to him 
in the future; — not even — as we had thought — 
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob ; — but, in the absence 
of family groups, anclforites and cenobites, priests and 
nuns ! It is unfortunate for the celibate successors 
of St. Peter that he was a married man ; and curious, 
that St. Paul, the Apostle of the Protestants, pre- 
ferred to remain unmarried. Nothing can more 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 



345 



clearly prove, than this query about matrimonial sal- 
vation, the slavish worship of pain which is taking 
possession of a large class of ecclesiastics in the 
present day. Sickened with the prating about hap- 
piness and interest among moralists of the last gen- 
eration, they do not perceive that this wretched idol, 
like all others, may be worshipped in two ways, — 
as a god, or as a devil ; by adoration, or by depreca- 
tion ; with the worship of love, or the worship of 
fear. The ascetic is unconsciously a votary of the 
very same false deity as the epicurean ; only shrink- 
ing from him in terror, instead of approaching him 
with hope ; getting into his power through antipathy 
instead of sympathy ; and visiting his approaches 
with exorcism rather than with prayers. In the eye 
of truth, however, an idol is neither god nor devil, 
but just nothing in the world. And so this foolish 
happiness — much stroked and much beaten image, 
carved out of the stock of a wooden philosophy — is 
nothing to the essence of human duty at all. Nei- 
ther positively nor privately does obligation lie in 
the feeling flesh or in the sensitive spirit : the sensi- 
bilities can give no sanctities, and take none away : 
but simply stand by as a neutral presence, that is 
neither to invite nor to deter. Other scales than any 
they can give — scales not of measured intensity, but 
of divine quality — have authority to determine the 
ends and provide for the holiness of life. 

It is perhaps a very shocking confession, but we 
shall nevertheless avow our doubt, whether " he who 
is continually meditating on heaven is more perfect 
than he who is always thinking on worldly affairs." 



346 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

" Continually meditating " on any thing whatsoever 
we should regard as a state so little perfect, that the 
question of more or less, according to the object that 
might engage so mutilated a soul, is without practi- 
cal value. But as the sustained contemplation of 
" heavenly things " seems to preclude, while the atten- 
tion to " worldly things demands," the descent of the 
will into action, and some wholesome strife for the 
moral powers, we submit that the last is so far higher 
than the first. If by " worldly things " we are to 
think only of objects intrinsically evil, and to suppose 
the man planning how to cheat his creditors, or 
wreak his revenge, or pamper his appetites, — the 
question begs its own answer, and any celestial 
quietism is better than that. But if the parallel be 
drawn between a mind floating in spiritual space, 
and a soul accepting, like a good athlete, the con- 
ditions of its battle here, and animating the limbs to 
work, and the brave heart to throb, under the con- 
trolling eye of the great Arbiter, then we say that 
this last, though he serve behind a counter at a retail 
trade, is a higher graduate in saintship than the most 
accomplished enthusiast of the cloister. Whatever 
be the Divine communication with human nature 
here, it can run through us safely, if at all, only like 
the electric fluid of the atmosphere above, when we 
stand in connection with the great earth-currents be- 
neath our feet: and he who would have all and hold 
all within himself that comes from heaven will find, 
on his glass stool of insulation, but fruitless shocks 
or dead paralysis. No man, poising himself apart, 
can there set and solve his own problems, — of duty 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 347 

any more than of truth. And, with all the rich 
painting of these "Lives of the Saints," nothing ap- 
pears to us more deplorable than the image which 
they give of minds intrinsically great and good, 
vainly expending their intensest force against the 
impalpable resistance of their own passions in vacuo. 
The formidable encroachments made by the An- 
glican party of late years, and the wide influence 
exercised by them through the indirect channels of 
an attractive literature, raise these topics of doctrine, 
morals, and taste into matters of national, and even 
political importance. The ecclesiastical phenomena 
of our time are very anomalous. While the clergy 
are, beyond comparison, more active and faithful 
than at any time since the Revolution, this is in great 
measure owing to an intellectual ferment among 
them, which places them at a greater distance than 
before from the sympathy of the nation which they 
serve. The fresh tide of ideas and sentiments which 
has rebaptized them with earnestness, and delivered 
them from routine, has poured in upon them from the 
Universities. It is of academic source, and of aca- 
demic character. It is the accumulation of thought 
and theory, the product of books : the result even of 
a vast and deliberate design, conceived and partly 
realized by one commanding and systematizing in- 
tellect. Of that deep and vivifying mind the change 
in the clergy is, in great measure, but the propagated 
influence. Meanwhile, during this reanimation of 
the Church on the collegiate side, the tide of life 
without has run in the opposite direction ; and the 
very feeling prevalent, that Oxford has been the scene 



348 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

of a sort of Popish plot for plunging England back 
into Romanism, and, by a species of logical black 
art, spiriting away across the German Ocean the 
Reformation and all its works, has broken down 
popular faith in the simplicity and veracity of the 
clergy, and shaken the whole fabric. The new doc- 
trines are hated ; and the old ones — as w r ould ap- 
pear from the eagerness to be rid of them — were not 
satisfactory to the divines themselves. The people 
who believe on authority are pulled two ways ; those 
who believe on conviction are pulled neither; and 
thus, while the momentum of an inert perseverance 
is lost, the vis viva of a new impulse is not gained. 
There is something, moreover, exceedingly offensive 
in the grand and sacerdotal style with which the 
new ritual pretensions are put forth by men who 
have only recently discovered them ; and among the 
names most prominent in their assertion, there is one 
at least whose appearance in such a connection does 
more to discredit the whole movement than shoals 
of tracts and Catence Patrum to advance it. In the 
Times of March 28th appear certain resolutions 
having reference to the Gorham decision ; they de- 
clare, among other alarming results of Mr. Gorham's 
interpretation, that the Evangelical " portion of the 
Church," by participation in " such conscious, wilful, 
and deliberate act, becomes formally separated from 
the Catholic body, and can no longer assure to its 
members the grace of the sacraments and the remis- 
sion of sins. " Among the subscribers to this denun- 
ciation against the Evangelical party are two sons of 
William Wilberforce ! Every body asks, Were not 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 349 

these gentlemen brought up at Clapham? — were 
they not baptized themselves by a vital clergyman, 
and catechized by a Cambridge saint? — was not 
Charles Simeon the trusted friend at the paternal 
house? — were they not, moreover, trained in a pe- 
culiar horror of wax candles and holy water, as in 
all the other essentials of decided piety ? When did 
they discover the good father's " formal separation 
from the Catholic body," and his uncertain pro- 
vision for the remission of their sins ? And this is 
the school which, when it would keep stagnant the 
young thought of a new generation, preaches up 
" the inherent sanctity of hereditary religion " ! Con- 
science no doubt is imperative, and superior to all 
weaknesses ; but conscience bears, without forfeiture 
of authority, some little mingling of human affection ; 
and few would have condemned a preference, in the 
present instance, for the silent modesty of filial rev- 
erence over the forward pomp of sacerdotal denun- 
ciation. 

Be this as it may, the hierarchical style is looked 
on with suspicion in England, especially when it is 
an upstart affair, new to the ears of men fifty years 
old. It is ranked with the rhodomontade of a Mex- 
ican dictator, or the bombast of a Haytian emperor. 
The chief effect of the dissensions which have pro- 
duced it is to startle quiet people into a discovery 
of what the Church theology really is ; to convince 
them in what latitude of thought she lies ; and show 
them that, while they have been drifting down the 
living current of centuries, she strives to hold to her 
moorings in the past, and denies that she even drags 
30 



350 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

her anchor in the least. The old doctrines being un- 
disguisedly reproduced, people exclaim, " This is not 
what we believe, and we do not choose to be bound 
by it. It may be all right after the fashion of the old 
doctors ; but somehow it does not ring like the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, and does not seem to fit with 
men that ride on railroads, read newspapers, and sail 
round the globe." The complaint, though felt rath- 
er than uttered, or uttered by those who cannot ex- 
plain and justify it, is perfectly well founded. It is 
impossible for the layman of the nineteenth century 
to think after the manner of the fourth, or even of the 
sixteenth, and he must insist, sooner or later, on car- 
rying the clergy with him. They, living more among 
books, may find it easier to sustain a stationary 
mode of mind ; but they, too, must secretly feel a 
change, the open recognition of which would be an 
infinite relief to their sincerity. The affectation of i m- 
mobility incurs in this world the penalty of destruc- 
tion. Catholic theories can no more arrest the course 
of change, than the doctrines of a universal atmos- 
phere can stop the wind. It may be very true that 
the Church is built upon a rock; but the rock is 
rooted in the earth, and stands above the sea, and 
with the mountains and the floods must roll on 
through the great seasons of Providence. 

A glance backward into the past will show that the 
alienation of the national intelligence and piety from 
the Church system is not wonderful, or to be simply 
bewailed as a sign of degeneracy. That system, if 
we assume the Anglican point of view, was made 
up before the end of the fourth century ; and if we 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 351 

take the Evangelical, early in the sixteenth. No 
change has found admission since. Let any one 
cast his eye, however superficially, over the course 
of knowledge and the history of civilization during 
the last three centuries, and say whether the image 
men formed to themselves of the constitution of this 
universe, at the commencement of this time, could 
possibly remain equally credible at the end. -It is 
vain to say that a revelation abides steadfast amid 
change : the dogmatic system of the Church is not 
a revelation, but a human elaboration of the contents, 
materials, and even accretions of revelation ; and its 
soundness and durability as a structure depend, not 
simply on the substance of the living rock within it, 
but not less on the selection, the combination, the 
proportion of parts ; for all which the architectonic 
intellect of man is alone responsible. No less vain 
is it to plead that the creeds have reference only to 
moral and religious truth, which lies above the reach, 
or at least beyond the range, of the inductive sciences 
and practical arts, and so shines with constancy 
through all their shifting light and shade. The al- 
legation is not tenable in fact. The Articles of the 
Church abound with metaphysical propositions, with 
historical judgments, with verdicts of literary criti- 
cism, which have no claim whatsoever to a moral or 
religious character. This is not, in our opinion, to be 
charged as a fault against those who framed the code 
of belief, — unless on the ground of an excess in defi- 
nition : it is impossible for faith to remain purely sub- 
jective ; it looks within and without, and from its ea- 
ger eye darts an interpreting glance on all things ; it 



352 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

has the attribute which Plato assigns to philosophy, — 
that it is (rvponTLKos ; and as it is ever in part a herit- 
age, in part a correction, of the past, its position in 
relation to antecedent thought must needs be laid 
down. We do not, therefore, agree with those who 
complain of religion for meddling at all with physi- 
cal and metaphysical questions, and mixing itself up 
with human history as well as divine. Minds at 
once inquisitive and devout cannot rest without a 
certain philosophy of faith, in which all that comes 
before their thought finds a place in harmony with 
their perception of a divine order. "We will not even 
raise the question whether, in the age of the Refor- 
mation, the propositions expressive of such a theory 
might properly be erected into authoritative condi- 
tions of Christian fellowship. But in defending the 
right of theology to go out from its own centre, and 
clear itself all round by objective definitions, we fore- 
go the plea which was to excuse it from all change, 
and can no longer say that, being wholly ethical and 
spiritual, it is free from admixture with the mutable 
and mortal. Its liberty to visit the entire realm of 
knowledge is not to be converted into a hostile oc- 
cupancy : the guest must not settle as the usurper, 
nor the seer's rod be turned into the iron sceptre. 
The essence of the religion of Christendom is eter- 
nal; but the dogmatic scheme constructed by apply- 
ing it forward and backward in time from the last 
hour of chaos to the day of doom, and along all radii 
in space from " the spirits in prison " to the seventh 
heaven, must take the risks of human theory, and be 
open to the enlargements of human experience. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 353 

Now, consider only the picture of the physical 
universe familiar to the mind of the sixteenth centu- 
ry at its commencement, and trace the inevitable 
effect of our altered distribution of natural bodies 
in space. The Ptolemaic system — not refuted till 
1543, and not renounced even by the learned for 
half a century more — had universal possession of 
the European imagination at the time when Luther 
preached. All men judged of the relations of earth 
and sky by the same immediate impressions of un- 
aided sense which dictated the first chapter of Gen- 
esis. Under these conditions, not only was the Mo- 
saic cosmogony accepted as a matter of course, but 
little difficulty was felt in conforming to even the 
narrow Hebrew conception of the actual system of 
the world, — a subterranean Hades, stored with in- 
carcerated spirits, and a heaven rising in succes- 
sive tiers for the reception of souls in light, and the 
personal abode of Christ and God ; a place pictured 
rather as an Oriental edifice than as an astronomical 
creation. Those caverns under the earth, and those 
halls above, supplied a local hell and heaven, which 
rendered easy all the dogmatic imagery respecting 
the ascent and descent of beings from province to 
province of this realm. And, while the earth main- 
tained its station in the midst, no misgiving was en- 
countered in representing the spectacle of the Advent 
and Incarnation as a central object of attention to 
the universe, and the Redemption as a fact not in 
the interests of one world, but in the history of all. 
But by the telescope and the calculus these concep- 
tions are set afloat and scattered through infinite 
30* 



354 MARTINEAlj's MISCELLANIES. 

space, with no structural picture to give them cohe- 
rence and support their relations. 

From the architecture, turn to the chronology of 
nature. In the sixteenth century, no facts were 
known demanding more than some five or six thou- 
sand years for the past duration of the globe ; nor was 
there any inducement to assign to different dates the 
origin of man and of his abode, or of this planet and 
the heavenly bodies. Hence, not only was there 
no hypothesis of development to embarrass by its 
rivalry the literal theory of creation, but no scruple 
was present to hinder the compression of the whole 
birth of things into six days. Thus the Sabbath 
rested undisturbed on its primitive foundation. That 
the Creative Power, having framed all else, should 
culminate in man, was no hard conception to those 
who deemed this earth the metropolis of the universe. 
Through the researches of geologists, this whole sys- 
tem of conceptions has become untenable. The pro- 
cess of creation has escaped all limits of chronology, 
and burst into infinitude of time, as well as space ; 
and no Sedgwick or Buckland of the Church can 
henceforth read, without rationalizing interpretation, 
the passage of the Decalogue inscribed above every 
altar : — " For in six days the Lord made heaven and 
earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on 
the seventh day ; wherefore the Lord blessed the sev- 
enth day and hallowed it." 

During the last three centuries, the knowledge of 
the earth's surface, and of the tribes that people it, 
has been vastly extended. The natural history of 
man, deriving light from new sources, and especially 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 355 

from the contrasts and affinities of different lan- 
guages, has become the object of a distinct science. 
We shall not be accused of over-statement if we af- 
firm, as the result of this change, that the question as 
to the unity of human species, their descent from a 
single pair, is a perfectly open one. Notwithstand- 
ing the decision of the late Dr. Prichard, the weight 
of opinion is probably in favor of the distribution of 
mankind into several races, originally distinct. The 
topic, at all events, is not prohibited even by the 
" Index Expurgatorius " of conventional theology, and 
was freely discussed between Arnold and Whately 
in their correspondence. Any influence which should 
discourage such inquiries would be inimical to all 
the higher interests of society ; and any intellectual 
clergyman would treat with just scorn the imper- 
tinent bigot who should accuse him of heresy for 
maintaining that a Papuan savage was of a differ- 
ent stock from the Caucasians. Yet is the bigot so 
entirely illogical ? Is not the Church the commis- 
sioned medium of salvation ? is not salvation condi- 
tional on regeneration ? is not regeneration the re- 
versal and obliteration of birth-sin ? is not birth-sin 
an affair of lineage, transmitted from the corruption 
of Adam's nature ? and was not that corruption the 
penalty of the fall ? If, therefore, we are not all the 
children of one stock, either there must have been 
many Edens, and Satan must have offered a plural- 
ity of apples to numerous Eves, black, red, and white ; 
or else the curse, and with it the counteracting re- 
demption, must be valid for only one tribe. In both 
cases, the dogmatic scheme of the Church suffers 



356 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

from manifest embarrasssment ; in the first, from an 
incredible hypothesis, too absurd to name except for 
argument's sake ; in the second, from a vast system 
of missionary effort, no less than of speculative belief, 
resting entirely on the universality of certain propo- 
sitions respecting the lost condition of man through 
hereditary contamination. The Reformers would 
have staked their entire religion, without hesitation, 
on the assertion that all men are sons of Adam. 
Does any instructed man, in the present day, feel that 
on such a basis Christianity may fitly rest ? 

Examples might be multiplied without end. Dr. 
Buckland can tell us whether any change of opinion 
has taken place respecting the Noachic deluge ; 
whether it was always thought a thing indifferent to 
Church theology to defend the doctrine of a univer- 
sal flood, or to give it up ; or whether any advocate 
was ever found so indiscreet as to work up an eager 
mass of evidence and hypothesis on this point, im« 
pressed more with the exultation of the triumphant 
divine than with the calmness of the inquiring phi- 
losopher.* And Bishop Thirlwall could pronounce 
whether the light thrown by comparative philology 
on the affinities of languages and the filiations of 
mankind affects at all the quiet credence with which, 
a century ago, the " Inspired Narrative " of the con- 
fusion of tongues was read by the learned, no less 

* See Buckland's " Reliquice, Diluviance; Observations on the Organ- 
ic Remains contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel and other 
Geological Phenomena, attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge. v 1 823. 
Compare Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise, Vol. I. p. 94, note, where 
this "attestation'' is withdrawn. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 357 

than the unlearned ; and whether, in general, the 
modern admission of a mythical element in the rec- 
ords of ancient nations can easily be repelled from 
the Hebrew literature, so as to place its monuments 
in the exceptional position of having no ante-histor- 
ical period. These particular features in primeval 
history have, it is true, no immediate reference to the 
dogmatic system of the Church, but they belong to 
the same record that supplies the whole scheme with 
its theological data; and it is impossible to throw 
open to discussion the questions they involve, yet 
retain the adjacent topics under the key of ecclesias- 
tical authority. 

Again, let it be considered what a revolution has 
taken place in human physiology and psychology, 
bringing under the dominion of ascertained law a 
host of phenomena, once familiarly referred to pre- 
ternatural agency. The mere removal of demonol- 
ogy from modern belief has introduced a wholly new 
condition of the human imagination, and alienated 
it from many conceptions formerly esteemed insep- 
arable from orthodox faith. In the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, the sphere yet open for Satanic 
interposition in the affairs of the world was not 
small, precarious, invisible, — the mere secret sugges- 
tion of a wicked thought, which after all might as 
well be indigenous as foreign, — but various and pal- 
pable ; recognized not in creeds only, but in medicine 
and law; and furnishing formulas of expression to 
the learned, and a thousand usages to the people of 
every class. Lord Bacon was not above the belief 
in " possession. " Sir Thomas Browne regarded the 



358 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

denial of witchcraft in the light of downright atheism, 
inasmuch as the same authority which reveals the 
dispensations of God and his goodness declares no 
less clearly the agency of the false one and the delu- 
sions of sorcery. Witches were disposed of by a 
process of trial more indicative of a susceptible faith 
than of a very sensitive justice : they were put into a 
pair of scales, with the parish Bible for a counter- 
poise, and their guilt or innocence decided by weight. 
The more formal and deliberate procedure of the reg- 
ular courts affords, however, still stronger proof of the 
tenacity with which this belief was interwoven with 
the religious faith of cultivated men : and the fact 
that two widows were hanged for witchcraft in 1665, 
under the sentence of Sir Matthew Hale, may help 
us to realize the entire change which has befallen 
the climate of modern thought. 

Yet no one, we think, can look with the mere 
lumen siccum of a logical understanding at the argu- 
ments by which the supporters of the doctrine of 
possession defended their position, without confess- 
ing that, on the Church principle of using all canon- 
ical Scriptures, not merely " for example of life and 
instruction of manners, " but as an " authority " " to 
establish any doctrine, " their ground is unassailable.* 

* We subjoin the aecount of the trial of the two poor creatures referred 
to ; taking it from S. T. Coleridge's " Confessions of an Inquiring 
Spirit," p. 45. 

"Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, widows, of Lowestoff, Suffolk, 
were tried for witchcraft, on the 10th March, 1665, at Bury St. Ed- 
mond's. Sir M. Hale told the jury, * that he would not repeat the 
evidence unto them, lest by so doing he should wrong the evidence on 
the one side or the other. Only this acquainted them, that they had two 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 359 

" Let a man, " says Coleridge, " be once fully per- 
suaded that there is no difference between the two 
positions, ' The Bible contains the religion revealed 
by God,' and ' Whatever is contained in the Bible 
is religion, and was revealed by God'; and that 
whatever can be said of the Bible, collectively taken, 
may and must be said of each and every sentence of 
the Bible, taken for and by itself, — and I no longer 
wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the 
inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, 
and yet affect to look down with a contemptuous or 
compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting 
the Copernican system as incompatible therewith ; 
or who exclaim, ' Wonderful! ' when they hear that 
Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old woman to the 
gallows in honor of the Witch of Endor. In the 

things to inquire after : first, whether or no these children were be- 
witched ; secondly, whether the prisoners at the bar were guilty of it. 

" ■ That there were such creatures as witches, he made no doubt at all. 
For, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, the wisdom of 
all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of 
their confidence in such a crime. And such hath been the judgment of 
this kingdom, as appears by that act of Parliament which hath pro- 
vided punishments proportionable to the quality of the offence. And 
desired them strictly to observe their evidence ; and desired the great 
God of heaven to direct their hearts in the weighty thing they had in 
hand. For to condemn the innocent, and to let the guilty go free, were 
both an abomination to the Lord. ' They were found guilty on thirteen 
indictments. The bewitched got well of all their pains the moment 
after the conviction ; only Susan Chandler felt a pain like pricking of 
pins in her stomach. The judge and all the court felt fully satisfied 
with the verdict, and thereupon gave judgment against the witches, that 
they should be hanged. They were much urged to confess, but would 
not. They were executed on Monday, 17th March following, but 
they confessed nothing. " — State Trials, VI. p. 700. 



360 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

latter instance it might, I admit, have been an erro- 
neous (though even at this day the all but universal- 
ly received) interpretation of the word which we have 
rendered by witch; — but I challenge these divines 
and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a 
belief in the modern astronomy and natural philoso- 
phy with their and Wesley's doctrine respecting the 
inspired Scriptures, without reducing the doctrine 
itself to a plaything of wax, or rather to a half-inflated 
bladder, which, when the contents are rarefied in the 
heat of rhetorical generalities, swells out round, and 
without a crease or wrinkle ; but bring it into the cool 
temperature of particulars, and you may press, and 
as it were except, what part you like — so it be but 
one part at a time — between your thumb and finger." 
The state of belief, in relation to demoniacal pos- 
session, at the commencement of the seventeenth 
century, is evidenced, not merely by casual and pri- 
vate examples, but by the public statutes of the 
Church of England. In the seventy-second Ecclesi- 
astical Canon, the practice of exorcism by the clergy 
is placed under regulation : it is classed with other 
offices of the ministry, — such as the keeping of fasts 
and holding meetings for sermons, and is submitted 
to the same restraints ; that is, the license and direc- 
tion of the bishop of the diocese must be first ob- 
tained and had under his hand and seal, ere a clergy- 
man is to attempt, under pretence of possession or 
obsession, by fasting and prayer, to cast out any devil 
or devils. We would recommend to the Bishop of 
Exeter the revival of this neglected episcopal prerog- 
ative : this reserved right of expelling or retaining 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 361 

devils is no small part of the power to open and shut. 
Why let it lie idle ? If exorcism is not a sacrament, 
it bears comparison with one: it casts out Satan, 
while baptism casts out his works. Is it not a part 
of the Apostolic commission, — " Cast out devils ; 
freely ye have received, freely give " ? Why take up 
the transmitted authority by halves, — an authority 
given in the Gospels and reaffirmed by the Canons? 
Did not the same voice which commanded the 
twelve to baptize command them to exorcise ? The 
operation of both offices is preternatural alike : and 
as even false prophets and apostles could cast out 
demons, there is no pretence for saying that the func- 
tion is beyond the reach of Christ's true represent- 
atives on earth. Where, we ask, can this parallelism 
be broken ? And if the progress of knowledge has 
put every sane man, though an ecclesiastic, out of 
condition for speaking of exorcism with a grave face, 
and forced every critic, however orthodox, to explain 
away, as best he can, the favorite evidence, with the 
first three Evangelists, of their Lord's Messiahship, 
viz. the instinctive recognition of Him by the devils 
who met his eye or heard his name, — is it to be 
expected that kindred conceptions, lying within the 
same scheme, should be as welcome to the minds of 
men as they were three centuries ago ? 

These changes in the whole intellectual atmosphere 
of the age are patent to all the world. They affect 
the general body of the educated laity, so as to place 
them in the most painful or the most dangerous of 
all positions, — a position above the faith which they 
profess. Such men have to make excuses for that 
31 



362 



MARTINEAU S MISCELLANIES. 



which should penetrate and rule their nature ; and to 
patronize where they should adore. The somewhat 
narrow, though scholarly, education of the clergy 
may often screen them from the full effect of this 
popular light of the time. But then, on the other 
hand, the great advance made during the last half- 
century in the theological sciences is known, for the 
most part, to them alone ; and if this has not largely 
modified their whole conception of the Christian 
faith, and made them conscious of many a doubt 
within their system, and a whole world of thought 
beyond it, the effect has been very different from that 
which the devoutest and most sober minds have ex- 
perienced in every other Protestant country. The 
light which has been thrown on the origin and 
structure of the earliest Christian records, — on the 
presence within them of purely local and human el- 
ements, — on the several streams of Jewish, Oriental, 
and Platonic influence, which blended with divine 
constituents to form the creeds of Christendom, — 
has rendered necessary a freer and larger method for 
disengaging the permanent from the transitory in the 
Church than was possible to the criticism of the six- 
teenth century. To those who study in earnest for 
holy orders, this is no secret. And so keenly do they 
feel the discrepancy between what they must prom- 
ise to teach and what they apprehend to be true, that 
the number is yearly increasing of candidates who 
are repelled from the Church by the conditions of 
ordination. These cases are smothered and kept 
secret, as far as possible; but to many it is well 
known that they comprise a large proportion of the 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 363 

finest genius and devoutest conscience that might of 
late years have been gained to the service of the al- 
tar. One after another have such men been brought, 
in the deep mood of holy faith and discipleship, to 
the very threshold of the Church ; but when the mo- 
ment of entrance came, the low and narrow portal 
would not let the high thought and the great heart 
pass. Minds of puny stature, or of a thin subtlety, 
or of compressible scrupulosity, slip through ; while 
natures at once of massive reality and of divine pro- 
portions are excluded : the priest glides in ; but the 
prophet stands without. Who can wonder at the 
spreading impression, that statesmen and high eccle- 
siastics fear and hate to see the consecration of ear- 
nest genius to religion ! that they ivish the Church to 
be a refuge for mediocrity! and that, so long as sa- 
gacious dulness or pliant laxity shall find no hin- 
derance, they are content to let the Christianity of 
England lie far beyond the average intelligence of 
her people, and sink into an object of unbelief to the 
learned, contempt to the intellectual, and shame and 
sorrow to the devout ! If they think by such means 
to clear away all troublesome spirits, and maintain 
a dignified, but unproductive repose, even this un- 
worthy policy experience will convict of mistake. 
There are other dangers to her establishment, and 
to the State with which it is connected, greater than 
can arise from eminent and powerful personal quali- 
ties in its ministers. The erratic energies of origi- 
nal minds are, no doubt, difficult to adjust with the 
drowsy persistency of an aristocratic Church; and 
that Beresfords and Blomfields are not anxious for 



364 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

the companionship of young seers, with fresh* eye, 
and brotherhoods under vows of piety and of pover- 
ty, is far from strange. The decent and tasteful for- 
malism which with inoffensive elocution drops the 
heavenly word upon the earth-cold pavement of a 
cathedral; which thinks infinite questions honored 
with the vehicle of gentlemanly breath ; which is 
content if burning truths but melt a little way into 
the icy heart of fashion ere they become extinct, — 
is preferred, on very intelligible grounds, to a deeper 
and more insatiable fervor. Yet even to the tem- 
poral peace of a Church there is a peril more alarm- 
ing than would be the genius of Pascal, the visions 
of Bunyan, and the enthusiasm of Wesley. When 
men, who begin life with the passions of the hust- 
ings, end it with the professions of the saint ; when 
the pamphleteers of a faction become successors of 
the Apostles and vicars of Christ; when the pertur- 
bations of personal temper appear beneath the holy 
and oily surface of episcopal address, and, under 
plea of zeal for souls, the mitred party-leader finds 
his occupation once again, — the repose of the Church 
is not less broken than if a Baxter had been pro- 
nounced orthodox, or a Whitefield had not carried off 
his converted colliers to the conventicle. The high- 
er order of minds may demand too much freedom, 
but the lower do not always prove conveniently pli- 
ant. If they secure you against the chances of a 
grand faith, they do not save you from the danger of 
a mean superstition ; and the aggressive fervor of the 
one may need less vigilance than the proud obstina- 
cy of the other. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 365 

Religious enthusiasm is the outburst of an indi- 
vidual's mind, and, radiating from his spirit, passes 
beyond this living centre in fainter waves away. A 
sacerdotal superstition, on the other hand, is the 
fixed passion of a class which remains permanent, 
and whose collective spirit can but slowly change. 
From the very nature of the case, it exists under 
conditions inaccessible to reason. It relies for sup- 
port on the class of feelings which have subjugated 
men to thaumaturgic imposture ; and it so blends 
the interested pride with possibly the disinterested 
faith of the priesthood, as to produce a certain am- 
phibious passion between hypocrisy and convic- 
tion, found peculiarly in the decline of religions. 
That passion is, perhaps, of all human influences the 
most difficult for the State to encounter. It is nei- 
ther temporal nor spiritual ; it has neither the pru- 
dence of reason, nor the generosity of faith ; it is 
closed alike to persuasion and to affection ; it lives 
neither on the land nor in the stream ; but evades 
you in the slime, where the produce of the secular 
earth grows rank, and the waters of a pure enthusi- 
asm lie stagnant. This monster passion is growing 
huge in England just now; — " Behemoth, in the 
covert of the reed and of the fens, that trusteth he 
can draw up Jordan into his mouth " ; but " from the 
mountains shall new rivers come down," and, " like 
a lion by the swelling of Jordan," he will be borne 
away. 

What, then, is the duty of the State towards the 
Church in a crisis like the present? — to represent, 
by a more intelligible demeanor than ever before, the 
31* 



368 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

alienated affections of the country ; and, in relation 
to dogmatic conditions of fellowship, to take a 
course directly opposite to the tendency of the agi- 
tating ecclesiastics. The sacerdotal party are strug- 
gling for a narrowed creed ; the Judicial Committee 
have wisely vindicated the principle of latitude. 
The Anglicans contend for dogmatic unity; let the 
State boldly demand provision for variety. The 
government is trustee in this matter, not only for a 
Church already marked internally by wide diversities, 
but for a nation of which nearly one half has, at dif- 
ferent periods, been injuriously driven from her pale. 
The civil disabilities of these excluded classes hav- 
ing been removed, their ecclesiastical excommunica- 
tion cannot safely remain neglected in any future 
legislation for the Church ; and so far from any con- 
traction of the terms of communion being for an in- 
stant entertained, a gradual enlargement of them 
ought to be steadily enforced by the government. 
Were all harmonious and healthful within the pale, 
there might be some fair excuse for leaving in quiet 
action what answered at least the wants of a defi- 
nite majority in the country; but it is notorious that 
if to-morrow all the sects of the nation were thrust 
into the Church, its disunion and diversities of creed 
would be no greater than at present ; and its only de- 
cent plea against comprehension is entirely forfeited. 
Besides, a state cannot lend itself as a party to the- 
ological disputes, but is bound to estimate the Church 
purely by its moral efficiency, — its competency to 
express and sustain the highest life of the people, to 
hold and train their affections, and to educate them 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 367 

according to their consciences, in their obligations as 
citizens of this world and children of God. 

If there be in a country an organized community 
of Christians, enjoying the confidence and sympathy 
of the nation at large, and able, by appeal to rever- 
ential feeling, to secure those moralities of the social 
state which law can defend only by coercion, we 
know of no valid theoretical objection against the 
endowment of such a body by the legislature ; and 
if its members choose to include within their aim 
other ends, foreign to the purposes of government, 
— such as the removal of mystic stains by mystic 
rites, — let them be free to do so, provided no dam- 
age is thus done to the prior state requisites. But 
this proviso must be stringently enforced; and if 
the supplementary ends are of a nature to prejudice 
the primary; if they comprise dogmas and ceremo- 
nies by which the range of social agency is restrict- 
ed and its integrity lowered; above all, if they so 
withdraw the mind of the clergyman from the rational 
and moral interests of society as to convert him in- 
to an obstacle in the way of national education and 
culture, except on the exclusive terms of his profes- 
sional speciality, — then the alliance is justly forfeited, 
and the State, failing to gain the stipulated benefits, 
reclaims of right the vested endowment. Can any 
candid observer affirm that the Established Church 
fairly performs the national function intrusted to 
her? Is she not at this moment spending all her 
zeal on disputes which, but for their possible results, 
the nation regards with contemptuous indifference ? 
Have her teachings been such, her methods of oper- 
ation such, as to retain in her faith and power the 



368 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

great working class of this country ? She complains 
perhaps of the copresence of rival sects, that break 
and paralyze her energies. But did she not herself 
disown them and drive them out? and have they 
not had, in her coldness or narrowness, such suffi- 
cient cause to quit her communion, that their found- 
ers are, for the most part, remembered with a just 
reverence, accounted as the worthies of our histo- 
ry, and acknowledged to have done a good work ? 
To what, so much as to the incompetency and mis- 
management of the Church, are we to ascribe the 
state of things so forcibly described by Mr. Thorn, 
in the following page ? 

" The Christian Church has instruments enough, and self- 
sacrifice enough, to parcel the world among her ministers, 
to break up the close layers of its masses so that, instead 
of only like consorting with like, and ignorance and vice 
pressed together, lying in thick strata on one another, hu- 
man beings, instead of dense, impermeable clusters, should 
stand forth, individual and distinct, so that air and light 
could circulate around them, and not one soul be left with- 
out living contact, through a brother's touch, with the 
sympathies of earth and the supports of heaven. But the 
Christian Church cannot do this as it now exists. With its 
conflicting creeds, and rival interests, and deadly jealousies, 
it cannot unite its devoted servants, and send them forth in 
one spirit to divide the toil between them. If we were all 
of one heart, believing that hqly affections are the only 
powers that can enlighten and regenerate fallen men, there 
might not be a spot in all this land in which even an indi- 
vidual could be found without the light and love of a broth- 
er's spirit bent full upon him. And why, is not this the 
case now ? Because, in consequence of our divisions 
about doctrines, Christianity cannot he locally applied. In 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 369 

that fact lies mainly the explanation of the spiritual condi- 
tion and destitution of the people. A parochial adminis- 
tration of Christianity, a beautiful and competent idea, is 
now an impossibility. A catholic religion requires a catho- 
lic church ; but we have only Roman catholic churches, 
and Church of England churches, and Calvinistic churches, 
and other reciprocally repelling and antagonistic churches. 
If Christianity was one power, and could use the world's 
wisdom of the division of labor, it could assign to each 
manageable district its own responsible agency, sufficient to 
flood it with light. But this cannot be where you will hard- 
ly find two neighboring houses in which the same theory of 
salvation is accepted. And so our Christian churches gath- 
er their isolated worshippers from all quarters ; and in our 
large towns, at least, no man has an allotted field, and no 
church and no person is charged with the spiritual condition 
of any spot. And thus our churches sit apart, exerting 
some attraction over scattered individuals of like affinities 
among the dispersed multitudes, but with no power of 
thoroughly occupying the Field of the World, each cultivat- 
ing its own corner of the vineyard. And as with that vil- 
lage of Samaria which would not receive our Lord because 
his face was as though he was going to Jerusalem, there 
are places in Christian lands where disciples, earnest and 
beloved as James and John, would not be received ; and, 
probably, like James and John, might know so little what 
spirit they are of, as to be ready to call down fire from 
heaven in their Master's name. These are the consequen- 
ces of established creeds and churches, — and this the price 
we pay for a Religion of Doctrines, instead of a religion 
that looks only to the spirit and the life ; for a religion of 
saving orthodoxes, instead of a religion of all-purifying love. 
The prophecy remains to be fulfilled, and Christianity can- 
not occupy the world as the waters cover the deep, because 
Theology forbids the union and the distribution of its pow- 



370 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

ers. We have left to Sin and Satan the advantage of the 
principle, Divide and conquer." — Religion, the Church, and 
the People, p. 20. 

The Church of England has enjoyed rare oppor- 
tunities. It wants nothing that history can give to 
render it respectable. It lost little of the external 
dignity of the elder system, when it opened a way 
for some infusion of energy from the Reformation. 
Its hierarchy ascends by the same gradations, and re- 
tains the same titles, as the parent body ; its creeds 
are translations of ancient forms; its liturgy is a 
provincial idiom of the language of the universal 
Church. The Anglicans are right in maintaining 
that it was not of Protestant origin, but rather a 
national graft detached from the stem of so many 
centuries ; that it did not rudely tear away, but 
simply trained around the local structure, the sacred 
ivy of antiquity. Yet it was not left without the 
purifying influence of a day of persecution, as well 
as the prolonged contact of more earnest and spirit- 
ual reformers, who sometimes introduced within the 
pale the self-denying virtues and rude fervor that 
are the secret of popular power. The honorable 
duty was devolved upon it, by the folly of a king, of 
being the advocate of liberty, and the representative 
of injured conscience. It has had the almost unin- 
terrupted and exclusive command of all the resources 
and all the distinctions of the ancient universities, 
and has enriched English literature with some of its 
most cherished names. If ever a Church has had a 
chance of collecting into the focus of its action the 
most various and even opposite influences that can 
sway the human mind, it is the Church of England. 



THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 371 

Yet, at last, the day is coming when the account will 
be asked of these opportunities. The churches of 
our forefathers will not be permanently left to the 
sort of teachers who are now wearying the world 
with their puerilities, and shocking it with their in- 
tolerance ; nor the ecclesiastical estates of the nation 
abandoned to the guardianship which has been so 
shamefully abused. To the large and humiliating 
subject of the Church temporalities, we have ab- 
stained from adverting. Convinced as we are, that 
what alone the Church cares to teach has ceased to 
be the real religion of this nation, we have not 
thought it worth while to enter into the abuses of 
secular administration. The exposure of the Eccle- 
siastical Commission is fresh in every one's recollec- 
tion. And in Mr. Beeston's sensible pamphlet will 
be found a series of facts as to the management of 
episcopal and chapter lands, which we should think 
it impossible to parallel in the history of private 
rapacity and corporate dishonesty. 

11 Raro antecedentem scelestum 
Deseruit pede Paena claudo." 

No one who reads the statements to which we 
refer can believe that the reckoning will be long de- 
layed ; and among the chances of the near future, 
we esteem it not the least, that an irresistible force 
of opinion will support in substance the prayer of a 
Memorial to the Queen, which appeared in this 
" Review " two years ago, — for Freedom of Con- 
science in .Matters of Religion.* 

" Admittance to the Universities of Oxford and 

* See the No. for July, 1848, p. 497. 



372 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

Cambridge, and the liberty of worshipping and ex- 
pounding the Scriptures in the churches of our 
ancestors, are now made to depend upon subscrip- 
tion to certain articles of faith known as the Thirty- 
nine Articles of the Church of England. 

" This test, when first established, was a departure 
from the principle of the Protestant Reformation, 
founded upon the right of private judgment, without 
which there can be no progress in religious truth ; 
and it led to those lamentable schisms which have 
since divided English Protestants into Churchmen 
and Dissenters of various denominations, who would 
otherwise have remained a united religious com- 
munity. These schisms are now widely extending, 
from the differences which have lately sprung up 
within the Church itself upon the meaning of the 
Thirty-nine Articles ; and we call upon your Majesty, 
by removing this cause of sectarian distinctions, as a 
middle wall of partition unknown to Christianity, 
and by promoting the application of the divine pre- 
cepts of universal charity, to restore among your 
Majesty's subjects the 'unity of the spirit in the 
bonds of peace.' 

" "We ask for the repeal of the Act of Uniformity 
(14 Car. II. c. 4) ; the abolition of all subscription 
tests for admission to universities, the houses of Par- 
liament, or for holy orders ; and that in the case of all 
churches built, endowed, or supported with public 
money, the people, by their local representatives, or in 
their religious congregations, shall have a voice in the 
appointment of their own religious teachers." 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES.* 

[From the Westminster Review for January, 1851.] 

In 1822, a French philosopher discovered the 
grand law of human progression, revealed it to ap- 
plauding Paris, brought the history of all civilized 
nations to pronounce it infallible, and computed from 
it the future course of European society. The mind 
of man, we are assured by Auguste Comte, passes 
by invariable necessity through three stages of devel- 
opment; — the state of religion, or fiction; of meta- 
physics, or abstract thought ; of science, or positive 

* 1. Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting 
to the Catholic Church. By John Henry Newman, Priest of the Ora- 
tory of St. Philip Neri. Second Edition. London. 1850. 

2. The British Churches in Relation to the British People. By Ed- 
ward Miall. London. 1849. 

3. Gilbert's Pamphlets, including the Pope's Brief; Cardinal Wise- 
man's Pastoral ; Lord John Russell's Letter, &c. 

4. The Bishop of London's Charge, delivered in St. Paul's, Satur- 
day, Nov. 2d, 1850. 

5. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and the new Hierarchy. 
By George Bowyer, Esq., D. C. L. London. 1850. 

6. Cardinal Wiseman's Appeal to the Reason and Good Peeling of 
the British People. Nov. 19, 1850. 

7. Lord Beaumont's Letter to the Earl of Zetland. Times, Nov. 
26, 1850. 

32 



374 MARTINEAtr's MISCELLANIES. 

knowledge.* No change in this order, no return up- 
on its steps, is possible ; the shadow cannot retreat 
upon the dial, or the man return to the stature of the 
child. Every one who is not behind the age will 
tell you, that he has outlived the theology of his in- 
fancy and the philosophy of his youth, to settle down 
on a physical belief in the ripeness of his powers. 
And so, too, the world, passing from myth to met- 
aphysics, and from metaphysics to induction, begins 
with the Bible and ends w T ith the " Cours de Philo- 
sophic Positive." To the schools of the prophets suc- 
ceeds " L'Ecole Polytechnique " ; and our intellect, 
having surmounted the meridians of God and the 
Soul, culminates in the apprehension of material na- 
ture. Henceforth the problems so intensely attract- 
ive to speculation, and so variously answered by faith, 
retire from the field of thought. They have an in- 
terest, as in some sense the autobiography of an 
adolescent world : but they were never to return in 
living action upon the earth. 

In 1850, the most practical nation of Europe, — 
the nation in which the high-priest of inductive sci- 
ence was Chancellor nearly two centuries and a half 
ago, — where the law of gravitation, and the theory 
of the tides, and the aberration of light, were demon- 
strated, the circulation of the blood discovered, the 
steam-engine invented, the first railroad made, — the 
nation of factories and ships, — with instinct against 
all hypotheses, and impatience for every subtlety, — 



* Cours de Philosophie Positive. l ere Le^on, p. 3, et seqq. 51 e 
Le^on, p. 653, et seqq. 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 375 

signs requisitions about the grace of baptism, holds 
county meetings on the doctrine of Apostolicity, 
demands leading articles on the remission of sins, 
and listens in crowded town-halls to the canon law 
and the Tridentine decrees. M. Comte's law stands 
aghast. Since the memorable date of his discovery, 
the world must have been altered : he found it in its 
last stage ; it is now in its first : it had then for some 
ages emerged from the last trail of theology ; it has 
now plunged again into the very nucleus of that neb- 
ulous light. The vaticinations of philosophy on hu- 
man affairs are seldom more fortunate than studies 
in the Apocalypse ; the pomp of discovery becomes 
ludicrous in the completeness of the frustration. In 
the present instance, this can be no just matter of 
surprise or regret ; it was a bold, and by no means a 
cheerful presumption, that mankind could never again 
feel an interest in those awful topics which have so 
long and deeply engaged their curiosity and affec- 
tions. Were the prospect ever so inviting of such 
an advance into the maturity of reason, a shade of 
melancholy wonder would fall back on the long in- 
fancy of the race. We would not willingly, for the 
most brilliant promise of the future, be made utterly 
ashamed of the past. But if, as Comte's law would 
persuade us, the whole career of religion on the earth 
is but the action of a nursery drama ; if, until it is 
played out, the real business of this world cannot be- 
gin ; if the energies displayed in it pursue illusions, 
and are barren as the tossing of the arms in dreams, — 
with what sad eye must we look on the greater part 
of human history ! The faith, which is the first ce- 



376 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

ment of nations and source of law, is but the trick 
of nature's police for cheating them into order. The 
poetry which issues from mythology and leads to 
history, springs from a root that bears no truth. The 
greatest revolutions the world has ever seen have 
broken forth from Jerusalem, from Mecca, from Wit- 
tenberg, to sweep over the earth without a meaning, 
and pass away. The old Hebrew race survives, tes- 
tifying to nothing, but perfectly fulfilling its destiny 
by selling quills and buying old clothes. The Church 
of Rome, of all institutions the most august and du- 
rable, — which crosses the chasm between ancient and 
modern times, and the ocean between the New and 
Old World; which has cost mankind more thought 
and treasure, and given them a more wonderful guid- 
ance, than any earlier or later agency, — has been but 
an empty presence, the richest pageant in the carni- 
val of folly. All the thought and genius spent on 
questions of faith, and inspired by the sentiments of 
devotion, have been wasted and misapplied : they 
come down to us, not for our help, but for our warn- 
ing ; and if we admire them, we catch no high con- 
tagion of wisdom. In short, if all the divinity, all 
the speculative philosophy, all the poetry and rec- 
ords of religion, are to be banished to the juvenile li- 
brary of the world, what literature remains to be the 
heritage of its maturity ? A theory which treats the 
"theological condition" of the human mind as one 
which is to be outgrown, exhibits history in the drea- 
riest light, as a confused waste of unproductive activ- 
ity and misguided faculty. We know of nothing to 
countenance such a contemptuous interpretation of 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 377 

the historical development of mankind ; or to encour- 
age the belief that the passions, which direct them- 
selves on supernatural objects, have spent their force. 
Their partial and local decadence, a phenomenon 
invariably marking, not the advance, but the decline 
of national life, has hitherto been succeeded by some 
wider renewal of their power. They have shown 
themselves capable of coexisting with the greatest 
vigor of intellect, the highest style of character, and 
the most various capacity for thought or for affairs. 
If we are amazed at the absurdities to which they 
sometimes commit themselves, we find a parallel in 
the superstitions of the dry reason ; and the devotee, 
who expects miracles from a saint's bones, is not 
more credulous than the mesmerist, who undertakes 
to read a newspaper through a brick wall. If we 
complain of the dissensions produced by rival creeds, 
we are met by the more fatal disintegration effected 
by sceptic egotism : and must confess that the dis- 
ruption of grand masses of society, as at the Refor- 
mation, is less terrible than the silent dissolution of 
all moral and ideal cohesion. And however mon- 
strous the crimes into which ecclesiastical passions 
betray men, they are, after all, less revolting than the 
loathsome atrocities of periods lost to all restraints 
of reverence ; and even the Papacy of the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries appears innocent, in compar- 
ison with the government of Asia and Greece under 
Alexander's successors, and of the Empire during 
the decline of Rome. We cannot admit that the 
theological turn of the present excitement in Eng- 
land betokens a retrograde course of civilization. 
32* " 



378 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

A true British Protestant, whose notions of " Pop- 
ery " are limited to what he hears from an Evangel- 
ical curate, or has seen at the opening of a Jesuit 
church, looks on the whole system as an obsolete 
mummery ; and no more believes that men of sense 
can seriously adopt it, than that they will be convert- 
ed to the practice of eating their dinner with a Chi- 
naman's chop-sticks instead of the knife and fork. 
He pictures to himself a number of celibate gentle- 
men, who glide through a sort of minuet by candle- 
light around the altar, and worship the creature in- 
stead of the Creator, and keep the Bible out of every 
body's way, and make people easy about their sins : 
and he is positive that no one above a " poor Irish- 
man " can fail to see through such nonsense. Few 
:even of educated Englishmen have any suspicion of 
the depth and solidity of the Catholic dogma, its 
wide and various adaptation to wants ineffaceable 
from the human heart, its wonderful fusion of the 
supernatural into the natural life, its vast resources 
for a powerful hold upon the conscience. We doubt 
whether any single Reformed Church can present a 
theory of religion comparable with it in comprehen- 
siveness, in logical coherence, in the well-guarded dis- 
position of its parts. Into this interior view, however, 
the popular polemics neither give nor have the slight- 
est insight; and hence it is a common error, both to 
underrate the natural power of the Romish scheme 
and to mistake the quarter in which it is most likely 
to be felt. It is not among the ignorant and vulgar, 
but among the intellectual and imaginative, — not 
by appeals to the senses in worship, but by consist- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 379 

ency and subtlety of thought, — that in our days 
converts will be made to the ancient Church. We 
have receded far from the Reformation by length of 
time ; the management of the controversy has degen- 
erated ; it has been debased by political passions, and 
turned upon the grossest external features of the 
case : and when a thoughtful man, accustomed to 
defer to historical authority, and competent to esti- 
mate moral theories as a whole, is led to penetrate 
beneath the surface, he is unprepared for the sight of 
so much speculative grandeur, and if he have been a 
mere Anglican or Lutheran, is perhaps astonished 
into the conclusion, that the elder system has the 
advantage in philosophy and antiquity alike. From 
this, among other causes, we incline to think that the 
Roman Catholic reaction may proceed considerably 
further in this country ere it receives any effectual 
check. The academical training and the clerical 
teaching of the upper classes have not qualified them 
to resist it. At the other end of society there are 
large masses who cannot be considered inaccessible 
to any missionary influence, affectionately and per- 
severingly applied. Not all men, in a crowded com- 
munity, are capable of the independence, the self- 
subsistence, without which Protestantism sinks into 
personal anarchy. The class of weak, dependent 
characters, that cannot stand alone in the struggle of 
life, are unprovided for in the modern system of the 
world. The cooperative theorist tries to take them 
up. But somehow or other he is usually a man 
with whom, by a strange fatality, cooperation is im- 
possible ; intent on uniting all men, yet himself not 



380 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

agreeing with any ; with individuality so intense and 
exclusive, that it produces all the effect of intolerant 
self-will ; and thus the very plans which by his hy- 
pothesis are inevitable, are by his temper made im- 
practicable. He appeals, however, and successfully, 
to the uneasiness felt by the feeble in the strife and 
pressure of the world ; he fills the imagination with 
visions of repose and sympathy; he awakens the 
craving for unity and incorporation in some vast and 
sustaining society. And whence is this desire, dis- 
appointed of its first promise, to obtain its satisfac- 
tion ? Is it impossible that it may accept proposals 
from the most ancient, the most august, the most 
gigantic organization which the world has ever seen ? 
that it may take refuge in a body which invests 
indigence with sanctity, — which cares for its mem- 
bers, one by one, — which has a real past instead 
of a fancied future, and warms the mind with the 
coloring of rich traditions, — which, in providing 
for the poorest want of the moment, enrolls the dis- 
ciple in a commonwealth spread through all ages 
and both worlds? Whatever socialistic tendency 
may be diffused through the English mind is not un- 
likely, in spite of a promise diametrically opposite, 
to turn to the advantage of the Catholic cause. The 
middle classes of this country, and the foremost 
ranks of the artisans, have been so thoroughly cast 
in the Protestant mould, and so jealously vindicate 
their sturdy individuality, that no reaction from 
Rome will affect them with any feelings but of 
amazement and contempt. Still, in the peculiar 
combinations of the present period, materials enough 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 381 

exist in England for the successful operations of a 
well-equipped, devoted, and skilful priesthood ; and 
if the prudence of Rome has failed her as to the 
manner of her recent advance, her true instinct has 
perhaps detected the right moment. It must be ad- 
mitted that his Holiness has thoroughly puzzled the 
English people. It is not ckar to them how they 
should comport themselves towards his pretensions. 
They have objections to arrogance at all times: and 
when an Italian priest meddles with their national 
geography, disposes of their counties, draws lines 
around their cities, and, fixing an admiring eye on 
the unfurnished cathedrals of Westminster and Bev- 
erley, supplies bishops for their future adornment, 
they feel inclined at least to let him know that they 
are here, and that England is not an unoccupied 
colony to be parcelled out among his flock. But 
they read Cardinal Wiseman's Appeal ; and become 
convinced that, if any thing is amiss, it is their own 
fault; for that, apparently, nothing has been done 
beyond the fair scope of law. Then it is useless to 
be angry, unless they alter the law : yet to repent of 
what they did, with a purpose of justice, and in a 
temper of generous trust; to recall their deliberate 
concession of free religious development; to resume 
again the detestable policy of theologic legislation, — 
is a course which they would feel ashamed to con- 
template. Moreover, in such a course, it is equally 
difficult to know how to begin, and where to stop. 
To legislate about mere names and titles, apart from 
the functions they denote, would be a helpless ex- 
pression of childish irritation ; to prohibit the offices 



382 



MARTINEATTS MISCELLANIES. 



themselves would be to drive a wounding law 
into the interior structure of the Roman Catholic 
Church. Were this admissible, what principle would 
remain to hinder the dissolution by law of the Meth- 
odist Conference, or the Free Church Synods ? Yet 
even those who most clearly see the dangers of ac- 
tion at the present crisis arrive regretfully, we think, 
at a conclusion in favor of entire inaction. An un- 
easy suspicion remains, that a step made good by the 
Papal hierarchy introduces an unsound element into 
English life ; that the case of the Roman Catholics 
is not parallel with that of the modern Nonconform- 
ists ; and that, however we may ignore the red hat 
and the archiepiscopal title, Dr. Wiseman continues, 
after all, something more to the state than a " Dis- 
senting minister." These impressions, we think, are 
to a certain extent wholesome and legitimate ; and 
may be at once justified and moderated by a glance 
at the theory and inherent action of the Roman 
Church, especially in its coexistence with the state. 

All Protestant controversies turn upon questions 
of doctrine; all Protestant sects are marked off by 
some peculiarity of creed ; and whoever, in the con- 
scientious exercise of his private thought, approves 
of the distinctive peculiarity, thereby falls into mem- 
bership of the sect, which is but the voluntary con- 
currence of many individuals in the same confession. 
In the whole circle of Christian, or quasi- Christian 
doctrines, there is not a point which has not been 
looked at by some believer or other, with such inten- 
sity as to grow incandescent before his mind, — to 
radiate a divine light upon him, and to be assumed as 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 383 

the centre of a system. Like the astronomer, intent 
on some suspected mystery in a star of inferior mag- 
nitude, he directs his soul — turned by some special 
susceptibility into a powerful reflector — towards 
one of the lesser lights in the great arch of faith, is 
dazzled by what the natural vision can scarce dis- 
cern, and suffers even neighboring objects to remain 
in shade, and whole constellations of truth to lie be- 
yond his field of view. Each sect being thus the 
direct result of some individuality, not even its own 
members pretend that its specialty is to be held up 
as an essential : they claim for it no other merit than 
that of recovering some important position from un- 
merited neglect. At the period of the Reformation, 
indeed, a different feeling prevailed. It was then 
thought a very serious thing to separate from a pre- 
vious communion, and constitute a new one; and 
nothing short of a difference in " fundamentals " was 
held as a justifying plea. But the process has been 
so often repeated, and by protracted indulgence to 
individuality the religious sympathies have grown 
so fastidious, that distinctions even more trivial, de- 
scending from conscience to opinion, and from opin- 
ion to taste, have become familiar as demarcations 
of worship. Hence, to the Protestant apprehension, 
denominations without end may coexist within the 
wide embrace of Christianity ; and provided the de- 
viations do not run beyond certain ill-determined 
bounds, they involve no forfeiture of the Christian 
name. " "What do these people believe ? " is the 
question of the passer-by, as he sees the crowd 
streaming from the conventicle of some new sect 



384 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

or sectiuncle. Each Nonconformist name suggests, 
to those who know its history, some particular tenet 
or turn of thought, of which it has undertaken 
the guardianship ; — Methodism expounds the new 
birth ; Calvinism, the irrevocable decrees ; Quaker- 
ism, the influence of the Spirit; Lutheranism, the 
justification by faith. Now this inveterate habit of 
attending exclusively to doctrines, Protestants are 
apt to carry into their estimates of the Romish sys- 
tem. They put it down among the sects of Chris- 
tendom, and judge it as they would Moravianism 
or Presbyterianism. They accuse its worship of 
idolatry, and its creed of falsehood ; they are offended 
by the apparent contrast with the simplicity of their 
own Scriptural or rational scheme ; and yield either 
to all the antipathies of intolerant zeal, or to the 
mild contempt of tolerant indifference. 

Both results are equally unwarranted. If Cathol- 
icism be a superstition, that is no reason for inter- 
fering with it by law. If it is not more a super- 
stition than Methodism, that is no proof that it is 
as little dangerous. Whether its solution of ques- 
tions of divinity be wiser or more foolish than that 
of the Protestant Confessions, is a matter with which 
the state has no concern. It may go astray on all 
the topics of the Thirty-nine Articles, may blas- 
pheme in its prayers to the " Mother of God," may 
be idolatrous in the mass and pagan in the ritual, 
without justifying the slightest legislative check. 
"Were it heretical as Antichrist, and false as the scar- 
let abomination, its career should run free of the At- 
torney-General. Englishmen enjoy — as insepara- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 385 

ble from freedom of conscience — unlimited right of 
error and delusion. There is (or recently was) an 
establishment near London for the adoration of the 
Vital Principle; where it is the most serious of 
crimes to eat beef, a deplorable infirmity to cut a 
cabbage, and the height of holiness to live on apples 
ripely dropping into the expectant aprons of devo- 
tees. The disciples of Mr. Holyoake undertake the 
propaganda of Atheism. The Book of Mormon 
succeeds among thousands in the North to all the 
honors of the Bible. And a nation which is wise 
enough to leave these things unmolested by coercive 
check cannot abandon its forbearance in dealing 
with the confessional and the eucharistic sacrifice. 
If the Latter-day Saints may organize their staff of 
" Angels," and send them, in the name of Joe Smith, 
to baptize converted potters and believing house- 
maids in the waters of every large river ; the Catho- 
lics cannot, on any charge of superstition, be denied 
their order of bishops, for the supervision of their 
priesthood, and the governance of their faithful. Af- 
ter tolerating so much new nonsense, we have lost 
all plea for growing angry with the old. 

If, then, we had to deal simply with a form of 
worship and theology, there would be no ground for 
distinguishing between the case of the Catholics 
and that of the Dissenters. And practically, per- 
haps, in the actual condition of Europe, the ques- 
tion now in agitation might be permitted to rest 
there. But, in fairness to the Protestant feeling, it 
should never be forgotten that the Roman Catholic 
system presents a feature absent from every other va- 
33 



386 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

riety of Nonconformity. It is not a religion only, 
but a polity ; — and this in a very peculiar sense. 
Other systems also — as the Presbyterian — in- 
clude among their doctrines an opinion in favor of 
some particular church -government ; — which opin- 
ion, however, professing to be derived from Scrip- 
ture by use of private judgment, stands, in their case, 
on the same footing with every other article of their 
creed. You might differ from John Knox about 
Synods, without prejudice to your agreement in all 
else. But with the Romish Church it is different. 
It is not that her religion contains a Polity : but 
that her Polity contains the whole religion. The 
truths she publishes exist only as in its keeping, and 
rest only on its guaranty: and if you invalidate it, 
they would vanish, like the promissory notes of a 
corporation whose charter was proved false. Chris- 
tianity, in her view, is not a Doctrine, productive of 
institutions through spontaneous action on individu- 
al minds; but an Institution, the perpetual source 
of doctrine for individual obedience and trust. Rev- 
elation is not a mere communication of truth, not a 
transitory visit of heaven to earth, ascertained by 
human testimony, and fixed in historical records: 
but a continuous Incarnation of Deity, a permanent 
Real Presence of the Infinite in certain selected per- 
sons and consecrated objects. The same Divine 
Epiphany which began with the person of the Sav- 
iour has never since abandoned the world : it ex- 
ists, in all its awfulness and power, only embodied 
no longer in a redeeming individual but in a re- 
deeming Church. The word of inspiration, the 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 387 

deed of miracle, the authority to condemn and to 
forgive, remain as when Christ taught in the temple, 
walked on the sea, denounced the Pharisee, and ac- 
cepted the penitent. These functions, as exercised 
by him, were only in their incipient stage ; he came, 
— to exemplify them indeed, but chiefly to incorpo- 
rate them in a Body which should hold and trans- 
mit them to the end of time. From his person they 
passed to the College of the Twelve, under the 
headship of Peter ; and thence, in perpetual Apostle- 
ship, to the Bishops and Pastors, ordained through 
legitimate hands, for the governance of disciples. 
These officers are the sole depositaries, the author- 
ized trustees, of Divine grace ; whose decision, wheth- 
er they open or shut the gate of mercy, is registered 
in heaven and is without appeal. Not that they 
can play with this power, and dispose of it by arbi- 
trary will. The media through which it is to flow 
have been divinely appointed : its channels are lim- 
ited to certain physical substances and bodily acts or 
postures, selected at first hand for the purpose ; — wa- 
ter at one time, bread at another, oil at a third, hand- 
ling of the head at a fourth. But the infusion of 
the supernatural efficacy into these " alvei " depends 
on an act of the appointed official ; through whom 
alone the divine matter — no longer choked up — 
can have free currency into the persons of believers. 
To this inheritance of Miracle is added a steward- 
ship of Inspiration. The Episcopate is Keeper of 
the Christian Records : and as those records are on- 
ly the first germ of an undeveloped revelation, with 
the same body is left the exclusive power of unfold- 



388 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

ing their significance, and directing the growth and 
expansion of their ever-fertile principles. Whatever 
interpretation the hierarchy may put upon the Scrip- 
tures, whatever doctrine or discipline they may an- 
nounce as agreeable with the mind of God, must be 
accepted as infallible and authoritative. The same 
Spirit of absolute Truth which spoke in the living 
voice of Christ, which guided the pen of Evangelists, 
still prolongs itself in the thought and counsels of bish- 
ops, and renders their collective decisions binding as 
divine oracles. The people who form the obedient 
mass of the Catholic Body are not without a share 
of this miraculous light in the soul; not indeed for 
the discernment of any new truth, but for the appre- 
hension of the old. The moment the disciple is in- 
corporated in the Church, faith bursts into sight : he 
passes from opinion into knowledge : he perceives 
the objects of his worship, and the truth of his creed, 
with more than the certainty of sense : and as he bows 
before the altar, or commits himself to the " Mother 
of God," the Real Presence and the invisible world 
are as immediately with him as the Breviary and the 
Crucifix. Through the whole Catholic atmosphere 
is diffused a preternatural medium of clairvoyance, 
which at every touch of its ritual vibrates into ac- 
tivity, and opens to adoring view mysteries hid from 
minds without.* 

Now, with the spiritual aspects of this theory we 



* Adequate authority for these statements will be found in Dr. 
Moehler's Symbolism, Part I. Chap. V., and in Newman's Lectures, III. 
p. 66, and Lect. IX. passim. 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 389 

are not here concerned. Reason has no jurisdiction 
over the inspiration that transcends it. But there is 
an humbler task to which the common intellect is not 
incompetent. We may plant this system in a polit- 
ical community, set it down beside the state, imag- 
ine it surrounded by families, and schools, and mu- 
nicipalities, and parliaments, by the prison and the 
court of justice ; within the shadow of law and in 
presence of sovereignty: and we may ask, how it 
will work amid these august symbols of a nation's 
life, how adjust itself in relation to them ? Will it 
leave them to their free development ? Can it tran- 
quilly coexist with them, and be content to see them 
occupy the scope which English traditions and Eng- 
lish usage have secured for them ? We are con- 
vinced it cannot ; that every step it may make is an 
encroachment upon wholesome liberty ; that it is in- 
nocent only where it is insignificant, and where it is 
ascendant will neither part with power nor use it 
well; and that it must needs raise to the highest 
pitch the common vice of tyrannies and of democra- 
cies, — the relentless crushing of minorities. 

For what is this scheme but an organized and 
undying attempt to establish a theocracy? The 
Church is not only a Heaven-appointed polity, but 
an imperishable incarnation of the Personal Deity ; 
the Episcopate is the head-office of his supernatural 
administration ; the sacraments, his occasions of au- 
dience and union with his subjects; the priests, the 
ministers of his court, the directors of its ceremo- 
nial, the channel of every petition and every reply. 
On what terms can the mere secular state live with 
33* 



390 ' MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

such a companion ? Those who wield the sceptre 
of the Most High will pay small heed to the baton 
of the constable. Where the Almighty reigns, what 
room will there be for the police magistrate ? — and 
where Omniscience directs, for debates in parlia- 
ment ? What natural function can fail to undergo 
eclipse, where the mystic shadow of the supernatu- 
ral traverses the air? True, the Catholic declares 
his belief in a sort of divine right vested in the civil 
government, and adopts the language of St. Paul, 
that "the powers that be are ordained of God"; 
and, on the strength of this, often professes a loyalty 
even more profuse than accords with the taste of 
a people who at times have had to uphold law 
against kingship. So, in truth, this doctrine of the 
state is not so lofty as it looks ; for while Govern- 
ment and the Church are both called divine, the one 
is referred to the God of nature, the other to the 
God of grace; the one is the old mechanism of 
heathen corruption, the other the new economy of 
heavenly redemption ; the one is for the coercion of 
enemies to the kingdom of Christ, the other for the 
guidance of friends; and who are enemies, who 
friends, the Church alone can tell. The result is in- 
evitable. The civil power, however extolled as simi- 
lar in origin and anterior in date, is treated, after all, 
as subordinate in authority, and bound to place it- 
self and its sword at the disposal of the ecclesiastical 
order. Its highest honor and perfection is to play 
the part of censor and avenger, jailer and execution- 
er, for the offended sacerdotal sanctities. Its prov- 
ince is to do the rough work, to undertake the odi- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 391 

ous necessities, which saintly hearts are too tender 
to behold, and saintly hands too clean to touch. 
Spiritual men cannot work at the forge and rivet 
chains, but only point to the limbs that are to bear 
them ; they cannot teach sword exercise, but only 
name the crusade where it might serve a holy end ; 
they are unacquainted with worldly finance, but can 
mention to the magistrate what sum would be use- 
ful, and meditate within themselves the purposes to 
which it shall be applied. Where the theocratic pre- 
tension prevails, it is idle to suppose that another 
supreme jurisdiction, resting on a mere human basis, 
can peacably coexist with it. Professedly destitute 
of divine direction, undefended from passion and er- 
ror, how can the inferior function sustain itself against 
the boundless grasp and grandeur of the superior? 
Well is it called, in the language of ecclesiastics, the 
secular " armP As surely as the body obeys the 
mind, and the nimble hand or heavy fist follows 
the keenness of thought or the shock of rage, must 
the temporal power, in every sacerdotal state, sink 
into the mere instrument of spiritual subtlety and 
anointed indignation. In proportion as it assumes a 
truly independent action, and insists on the suprem- 
acy of law, the Church considers itself injured, com- 
plains of the arrogance of the princes of this world, 
and puts on that air of hurt innocence which is the 
favorite disguise of the intensest pride. Hear, for 
instance, the affecting statement by Father Newman, 
of the hard lot of the true Church, from the disturb- 
ing vicinity of the State. 

" The Church is a sovereign and self-sustaining power, in 



392 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

the same sense in which any temporal state is such. She 
is sufficient for herself ; she is absolutely independent in her 
own sphere ; she has irresponsible control over her subjects 
in religious matters ; she makes laws for them of her own 
authority, and enforces obedience on them as the tenure of 
their membership in her communion. And you know, in 
the next place, that the very people who are her subjects, 
are in another relation the State's subjects, and that those 
very matters which, in one aspect, are spiritual, in another 
are secular. The very same persons and the very same 
things belong to two supreme jurisdictions at once, so that 
the Church cannot issue any order but it affects the persons 
and the things of the State, nor can the State issue any or- 
der without its affectiug the persons and the things of the 
Church. Moreover, though there is a general coincidence 
between the principles on which civil and ecclesiastical wel- 
fare respectively depend, as proceeding from one and the 
same God, who has given power to the magistrate as well 
as to the priest, yet there is no necessary coincidence in 
their particular application and resulting details, just as the 
good of the soul is not always the good of the body ; and 
much more is this the case, considering there is no divine 
direction promised to the State, to preserve it from human 
passion and human selfishness. Under these circumstances, 
it is morally impossible that there should not be continual 
collision, or chance of collision, between the State and the 
Church ; and considering the State has the power of the 
sword, and the Church has no arms but such as are spiritual, 
the problem to be considered by us is, how the Church may 
be able to do her divinely appointed work without molesta- 
tion or seduction from the State If the State 

would but keep within its own province, it would find the 
Church its truest ally and best benefactor. She upholds 
obedience to the magistrate ; she recognizes his office as 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 393 

from God ; she is the preacher of peace, the sanction of 
law, the first element of order, and the safeguard of moral- 
ity, and that without possible vacillation or failure ; she 
may be fully trusted ; she is a sure friend, for she is inde- 
fectible and undying. But it is not enough for the State 
that things should be done, unless it has the doing of them ; 
it abhors a double jurisdiction, and what it calls a divided 
allegiance ; aut Ccesar aut nullus, is its motto, nor does it 
willingly accept of any compromise. All power is found- 
ed, as it is often said, on public opinion ; to allow the exist- 
ence of a collateral and rival authority, is to weaken its 
own ; and though that authority never showed its presence 
by collision, but ever concurred and cooperated in the acts 
of the State, yet the divinity with which the State would fain 
hedge itself would, in the minds of men, be concentrated 
on that ordinance of God which has the higher claim to it." 
— pp. 144-146. 

Simple people imagine that theocratic claims are 
harmless, because they refer only to spiritual matters. 
Cardinal Wiseman assures the Dean and Chapter 
of Westminster, that he does not covet their Abbey, 
or begrudge their revenues, or dream of meddling 
with their congregation. He only wants to be a city 
missionary, and carry light and consolation into noi- 
some courts and alleys, where the Protestant influ- 
ence cannot penetrate. He and his episcopal breth- 
ren have no other function than to see that the " poor 
Irish " say their prayers, — that the priests are dili- 
gent in their calling, — that the altars have clean 
cloths, and the broken crucifixes get repaired. They 
administer in a kingdom that is not of this world : 
and never can quit their quiet sphere to enter into 



394 MAHTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

the affairs of civil life. Human interests and institu- 
tions are no more in danger from them than from 
the angels in heaven. "We believe this to be said in 
perfect good faith, from the Catholic point of view ; 
and for the hour to be true even from the Protestant. 
But before we concede, upon this plea, the demand 
of every church to perfect autonomy, — before we 
turn away with the careless assurance that these 
clerical matters are no affairs of ours, — it might be 
well to know how and where the line is to be drawn 
between temporal and spiritual things. Even in the 
Reformed churches, this boundary has been a topic 
of serious dispute. They have all declared that 
the kingdom they aspired to find was not of this 
world. Yet Calvin made laws in Geneva, about the 
dress of brides and the ringing of bells ; employed 
the police to drive the inhabitants to church ; shut 
up the theatres, carried off the fashionable from the 
masquerade to bridewell, issued warrants against 
dancing, and rendered it felony to question the dog- 
mas or criticize the preaching of his party. John 
Knox contended, that " to the Civil Magistrate spe- 
cially appertained the ordering and reformation of 
Religion," and the Reformers of Edinburgh, in 1560, 
made the repeated celebration of the mass punish- 
able with death. The zeal of the Free Church of 
Scotland for the "crown rights of the Redeemer," 
(that is, for the irresponsibility of the clergy,) has 
rendered impossible its friendly alliance with the 
State. But the very nature of the Protestant system 
presents a limit to these inconveniences: — First, 
its doctrine is not sacerdotal ; it pretends to no se- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 395 

cret magic all its own: its appeal is popular; it 
rouses the conscience of men in masses, instead of 
practising on their weakness one by one. Secondly, 
it looks on the world as so lost to God, that no evan- 
gelical men can mix themselves much with its affairs. 
From their spiritual position, they see it across a 
vast chasm, dividing the opposite poles of destiny: 
they communicate with it as with an alien, if not a 
hostile land; where no province lies which it is 
given them to rule. A realm, therefore, always re- 
mains as the proper theatre of temporal sway. They 
may mark its boundary wrong, but they mark it 
somewhere. But on the Catholic map of this uni- 
verse, no such line is found at all ; or if it seems to 
be there, it is but as the shadow of a window-frame, 
throwing its bar across the sheet, and shifting as the 
sun of ecclesiastic glory rises or declines. What is 
temporal in England is spiritual in Spain; what be- 
longs to the kingdoms of this world in the nineteenth 
century, belonged to the kingdom of heaven in the 
sixteenth. De jure, the divine commission extends 
to every thing, and might absorb this planet into the 
Papal state ; de facto, it includes what it can, and 
stops where it must. In Paris, the Archbishop cel- 
ebrates high-mass to orders from an Algerine Gen- 
eral, or the Prefect of Police, and bestows his pliant 
benediction on King or Revolutionary hero. In Tu- 
rin a law is passed to render ecclesiastics amenable 
to the civil courts : the high dignitaries of the Church 
refuse obedience : to the minister of state who pro- 
posed the law, they deny, on his last bed, the rites of 
his religion, and he dies unshriven : Rome supports 



396 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

them in their resistance, and they are now in exile 
or in prison for preferring their vows to their alle- 
giance. To recede with passive resistance in every 
step, to advance with active pressure in every open 
direction, is the policy of a priesthood that never dies, 
The city and territory of Rome itself exhibit per 
fectly the result to which the Catholic distinction be 
tween the civil and the spiritual departments will re 
duce itself, when let alone. There, the Pope is Mon 
arch, as well as Primate, and can divide the offices 
as he will: and there, the temporal functionaries 
consist of the soldiery and the police. This narrow 
restriction of the business of the government, which 
is there brought about by the ascendency of the 
priesthood, may be elsewhere partially produced by 
the freedom of the people. The larger the range of 
life that is left to individual self-direction, the less 
does there remain for public law to take up, and the 
more limited will be the work of public rule. During 
the last thirty years, there has been, till lately, a con- 
stant retreat of legislation from its interference with 
the private will; from the press, from commerce, 
from litigation, from religion, restrictions have been 
removed; and the notion has become current, that 
the State has nothing to do but to protect u body and 
goods." So long as such an idea retains its influ- 
ence, and government attempts no more than to stop 
theft and keep the peace, it can scarce come into col- 
lision with any priesthood, and no apprehension of 
any interference will exist : the two rivals are for the 
time on different walks, and will not meet. The 
vicar apostolic does not aspire to be constable, or 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 397 

the lord-lieutenant to perform extreme unction. But 
the time comes of inevitable reaction against our ex- 
aggerated trust in individual self-guidance: fever and 
pauperism in cities, sullen indigence in the country, 
excessive work in factories, and juvenile ignorance 
everywhere, compel us, as a community, to enlarge 
our aims and embrace some moral ends. Reforma- 
tory discipline is attempted in the prison ; industrial 
training in the Poor Law Unions ; public grants are 
made for education ; and in Ireland, first, common 
schools, next, lay colleges, are created under sanction 
of Parliament. No sooner does this nobler states- 
manship begin to take effect, than the politician is 
told that he is trespassing on the churchman's ground. 
Who but the priest can undertake the " cure of 
souls"? Who but he distinguish their medicine 
from their poison ? Who else has a right to care 
about God's poor ? Are the Catholic youth to read 
history without a spiritual guide at their elbow, to 
tell them whom to canonize and whom to hate ? — 
and to learn geology without the art of squeezing 
the epochs within orthodox dimensions ? — and to 
study astronomy without warning from the contu- 
macy of Galileo ? No ; vested interests of the ho- 
liest kind preoccupy the territory of knowledge; no 
plough shall touch, no harvest insult, its special right 
of eternal barrenness ; it is the ri^vos of a God ; only 
sacred cattle shall graze there ; and every intruder be 
taken to the sacrifice. And so, amid a pageantry 
and with a secrecy fitted to mystify a deed of dark- 
ness, the Irish Episcopate hold a Synod at Thurles ; 
resolve to quench the best light of promise that for 
34 



398 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

many a generation has been lifted above the storm 
of faction ; and surmising, with sure instinct, that 
what brings the nation to port must bring the priest- 
hood to wreck, they repent of the prospect of repose, 
and steer the vessel right back into the tempest. 
The colleges where Protestant and Catholic may 
meet in the class-room, find that they are made of 
the same stuff, and feel the blending flames of the 
same generous enthusiasm ; w r here science cannot 
be bewildered, or history suborned; where Rome 
under the Republic may be compared to Rome un- 
der the Primacy, and natural politics appear beside 
the supernatural ; where tastes may grow up too he- 
roic for the sacerdotal type of saintship, — are de- 
nounced as " godless " ; their condemnation is pro- 
cured from the chair of St. Peter; and the project is 
set on foot of an exclusive university, where no her- 
etic step shall ever tread, and the mediaeval measures 
of nature and standards of truth shall be supreme. 
We trust that the government will patiently uphold 
these colleges ; and will so give to the Catholic laity 
the opportunity of proving, that the ecclesiastical de- 
mand upon their obedience may be over-strained; 
that they will not lay down at the feet of a confessor 
their duties as parents and as citizens; and that they 
will put to a practical test Lord Beaumont's regret- 
ful assertion, " The Church of Rome admits of no 
moderate party among the laity; moderation in re- 
spect to her ordinances is lukewarmness, and the 
lukewarm she invariably spews out of her mouth." 
The crusade commenced against the colleges is 
now spreading, it is said, to the national schools. 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 399 

"When they were first established, it was at the ex- 
pense of a monopoly previously enjoyed by the mem- 
bers of the Protestant Establishment ; and encoun- 
tering the bitter hostility of the clergy, they were ac- 
cepted as a boon by the priests. But now the times 
are changed : through the perseverance of govern- 
ment and the patient energy of Archbishop Whate- 
ly, the prejudices of his Church have given way ; and 
in the local administration and working of the sys- 
tem, religious parties are becoming equalized. At 
this symptom, the priesthood begin to show signs of 
restiveness ; to the Catholic imagination, mere equal- 
ity of privilege has grown flat and lost its charm : 
and schools for many hundred children are deserted 
and closed, because the parish priest is not made 
visitor. And so, in proportion as legislation rises 
above matters of police, and interposes to check the 
ills of neglected private obligation, in proportion as 
it lets the stiffness of a pedantic economy give way a 
little to the natural humanity, and attempts benefi- 
cent prevention, instead of posthumous infliction, — 
just therefore when it begins to interest the moral 
feeling of the nation, and attest the growth of high- 
er sentiments, — does the altar appear to bar the 
way, and the priest declares that all within the rail 
is his. At the moment and in the act of aspiring to 
a nobler life, the State is blocked out and spurned 
as most profane. So has it always been with that 
proud Church : and so must it ever be. Yet, strange 
to say, all this may be without fault, without pride, 
in individuals. It involves no reproach to private 
believers or to official guides. They are entangled 



400 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

in a net whose threads have shot out fibres into their 
wills, and penetrated the very substance of their 
souls. What, indeed, is a man struggling in a The- 
ocracy, but as an insect in the waters of a cataract ? 
He has become part of a mightier element, and must 
drift whither it will sweep. The arrogance of Rome 
is something impersonal : it is a function of her 
organism, a law of her ecclesiastic life. It utters 
itself alike from the lips of the meekest and the most 
insolent of her prelates ; and whether acting through 
the energy of Hildebrand, the frivolity of Leo the 
Tenth, or the saintly virtues of Pius the Fifth, never 
permits you to forget the " Vicar of Christ." It is in 
the very atmosphere of her traditions. Like the wind 
which, in crossing the ocean, distils its surface, tak- 
ing up the pure water and leaving the brine ; these 
traditions, sweeping over the ages, absorb every glory 
and omit all the shame : and the temper which they 
nourish is the accumulated product of a history 
which forgets no victory and dwells on no defeat. 
But the social operation of this spirit is not allevi- 
ated by its absence, as a personal disposition, from 
the individual heart. It cannot be untrue to its ten- 
dency. A system pledged to solitary and universal 
empire ; engaged to see nothing, hear nothing, upon 
God's earth, except itself, and the subjects given for its 
sway ; bound to blot out all countries from the map, 
and all ages from Christian history, which do not 
bear witness to its unity and majesty, — can make 
terms with no rival, and endure no equal. Others 
are free, when only not oppressed ; but this feels 
itself a slave, till it is lord of all. 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 401 

What, then, is the political inference to be drawn 
from this theocratic character in the Roman Church ? 
Have we been supplying premises for a no-popery 
conclusion ? Not so ; — unless the canons of Exeter- 
Hall logic are henceforth to be the rules of English 
statesmanship ; and a fickle cowardice to take place 
of that noble courage with which, in many a danger, 
the English people have dared to be just. Ambition 
in a sect, and exclusiveness in a creed, are good rea- 
sons for not arming them with special power, and 
trusting them with political privilege : but no reason 
at all for withholding from them civil equality, or im- 
posing coercive limits on the spontaneous develop- 
ment of their religious institutions. No one thinks 
of insisting on humility of mind as a condition of 
the franchise, or denying the alderman's gown except 
to the shoulders of modest innocence : and as little 
can w T e make the temper of a Church a qualifying 
ground of its civil freedom. The religious liberties 
which have been won, through the cost and struggle 
of two centuries, would not be worth a twelve- 
month's purchase, were they held on no tenure of 
immutable justice, but only during theological good 
behavior. Shall it be said that, in passing the great 
Emancipation Act, the British legislature mistook 
the nature of the Romish system, and fancied it a 
meek affair, like Quakerism ? Is the Catholic relig- 
ion so new a thing that its character, obscure in 1829, 
wakes us into wild surprise in 1850 ? If there is any 
thing in history known by the attestation of unbro- 
ken experience, if any thing deep-cut into the memo- 
rials of British life by the graver of the nation's 
34* 



402 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

resolve and agony, surely it is the lofty pretensions 
and the sleepless patience of the Church u one and 
indivisible." Had this been a secret twenty years 
ago, the removal of Catholic disabilities would lose 
not only every noble, but every respectable feature ; 
and would be degraded from an act of legislative 
rectitude to the level of a defeated bargain, or an ex- 
torted boon. But it was no secret: the repeated 
Parliamentary debates, the protracted controversies 
between the established and the disabled commun- 
ions, had long brought out every feature of the case ; 
and nothing was done but with open eyes. It was 
fully intended to take all the risks of a just course, 
and to leave to the Roman Catholics the undisturbed 
advantage of any arrogance or weakness, any policy 
or success, any mitre, pallium, or title, for which 
room might be found within the limits of the law. 
We have seen nothing to convince us that the ap- 
pointment of the new Catholic hierarchy involves the 
violation, or even the slightest straining, of the law : 
and it may now be fairly presumed that Mr. Bow- 
yer's pamphlet, in which the legal aspects of the case 
are strikingly presented, — is felt to be unanswer- 
able.* The Papal brief, then, is valid for its end ; the 
bishops it appoints are already there, lawfully accost- 



* Sir E. Sugden's opinion has since been given, against the legality 
of the Papal procedure, so far as the publication of the Letter Apostolic 
is concerned. The offence, however, is against a law which has been 
stripped of its penalties : and is apparently constituted, not by the sub- 
stantive act of creating and allocating the new hierarchy, but by the 
formal error of publishing the instrument through which this is done. 
If so, prosecution may touch some person, but cannot affect the thing. 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 403 

ed by their titles, and exercising supervision over the 
clergy of their dioceses ; — no prosecution can disturb 
them ; — if they are to be deprived, it must be by act 
of Parliament ; but what could be the provisions of 
such an act ? Is it to prevent the Roman Catholics 
from having bishops? — to say that their Church 
must cease to be episcopal ? This would be tanta- 
mount to an absolute proscription of their religion ; 
which, as we have shown, is essentially a polity, and, 
apart from the prelatical element, can have no exist- 
ence. It is a mockery of toleration to permit people 
to believe in a divine corporation, and then refuse 
them the corporate officers. Or is it to allow the 
bishops, but to make restrictive rules as to what 
they shall be called? This being the most simply 
vexatious course, enough to show a petty temper, 
not enough to touch the distribution of real power, 
is most likely, we fear, to be thought soothing to the 
English clergy, and to be offered to them as adapted 
to their taste. It were better, we think, to leave them 
unsoothed than to bring British legislation into con- 
tempt. Or, finally, is it to allow both bishops and 
their names, but to control their nomination from 
Rome, and in some way insist that their origin be 
indigenous, and their dependence insular? On po- 
litical grounds, this is the only measure for which a 
plausible excuse can be urged. It might be plausi- 
bly said to the Roman Catholics, " You shall have 
every liberty enjoyed by any subject of these realms: 
no one advantage shall Methodist or Baptist possess 
over you : whatever the largest exigencies of religious 
freedom have been defined by your countrymen to 



404 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

include, shall be secured to you. If you are content 
to stand on an equality with them, no prejudice shall 
disturb your position ; but your demands go beyond 
theirs ; no sect before ever asked to have a body of 
ruling officers distributed over the country, owing 
their appointment and their spiritual allegiance to a 
foreign power. If the Pope should fall under the 
ascendency of cabinets unfriendly to England, what 
security have we that unpatriotic influences may not 
be poured through the channels of power, thus rami- 
fying to our poorest population? Insulate yourselves, 
like other Nonconformists, and your faith shall be 
absolutely free. But at present you require, under 
the name of religion, a privilege which every one 
else would esteem political" 

This argument, however, is not applicable as 
against the admission of the new hierarchy. For, if 
you sweep that hierarchy away, you only reinstate 
the Vicars Apostolic, whose Papal dependence is 
even more close, and more open to the objection 
urged, than that of the provincial episcopate. Must 
we go further, then, and cut off the organic connec- 
tion with Rome in every form ? Desirable or not, the 
thing is simply impossible. Without the living con- 
nection with their Head, the members of the Catholic 
Church cannot subsist as parts of a spiritual body : 
and to require them — either by electing their bish- 
ops or by vesting their allocation in an English 
High-priest— to form themselves into a detached 
Church, is only to insist on their becoming apos- 
tates. No doubt, they ask more than satisfies the 
Dissenter : but it is not optional with them to do this 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 405 

or to take the humbler place. They cannot shut up 
within the four seas a Church, whose universali- 
ty, whose identity with entire Christendom, whose 
bounden allegiance to the chair of St. Peter, is the 
prime article of their belief. They must either en- 
joy, then, this larger liberty than others, or they 
must have none at all. While their altars remain 
open, and hundreds of priests daily appear at ma- 
tins and vespers, no choice remains but between 
open and clandestine communication with Rome ; 
and if there be contingent political danger in a for- 
eign connection, that danger is not likely to be les- 
sened when the correspondence is maintained, in the 
style of a conspiracy, between an offended Pontiff 
and a disaffected English and Irish people. 

"With our eye, then, full upon the inevitable ten- 
dencies of the Romish system ; with the conviction 
that it generates a state of mind at variance with 
the . English standard of civil and religious liberty ; 
with the certain knowledge, that the equal and tol- 
erant treatment it receives it will never, in its place 
and day of power, be willing to reciprocate, — we 
yet say to our fellow-countrymen, Be just, and fear 
not ; put not your trust in coercive laws ; dream not 
that divine truth can be bought with the coin of hu- 
man injury; be resolved, if ever you have to defend 
your own rights from encroachment, to enter the field 
without reproach. The free mind and the large 
heart, in yourselves and your children, will be a 
surer charm against the priest and the canon law, 
than preventive statutes or an outcry for the Queen's 
supremacy. 



406 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

And this last phrase, this " Queen's supremacy," 
brings us to the real source of most of the zeal, and 
of all the confusion, so conspicuous in the present 
anti-Papal excitement. We have hitherto treated 
the question as if it seriously lay between the Ro- 
man Catholic body and the British nation. But the 
real quarrel is felt to be between the Papal and the 
Anglican headships, and between the rival Episco- 
pates proceeding from them and now existing side 
by side. Whoever sees, in the vehemence of the 
storm now raging, a comforting proof of the Protes- 
tant spirit of the English Establishment, puts a very 
false reading on the signs of the times. We do not 
hesitate to say, that, in one aspect, it is the strongest 
symptom which has appeared since the time of the 
Stuarts of the profoundly sacerdotal* character of 
our Church, and its intense alienation from the Re- 
formed religion. For whence, and on what occa- 
sion, is this mighty outburst of indignation? Does 
it break forth on the appearance of some devastat- 
ing heresy^ and take some glorious and threatened 
truth under the protection of its enthusiasm ? Not 
at all; no alarming doctrine, no insidious book, no 
new missionary of error, has been introduced into 
the land; the people believe to-day what they be- 
lieved three months ago ; no fresh agency, not so 

* Throughout this paper we use the word " Priest," not loosely, as 
merely equivalent to " Minister," but in the proper hieratic sense, to 
denote a person who interposes himself between man and God, and 
claims to be the indispensable medium of their effectual communica- 
tion. This idea must be carried into all the kindred words, " sacerdo- 
tal,' 1 " pontifical " ; and, with the needful modification, into the word 
"altar" as opposed to "communion-table." 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 407 

much as a single priest, has been added to the pow- 
ers of " perversion " existing before. Nay, the expe- 
rience of seventeen years, during which the so-called 
"Anglican" movement has been going on, has 
shown with what patience every distinctive feature of 
the Pontifical creed and discipline might be contem- 
plated ; how complacently bishops could negotiate 
with these, how meekly endure the new grandeur 
they conferred, so long as the oracle came from Ox- 
ford, not from Rome, and the apostolic glory, ex- 
posed to no competition, enjoyed the monopoly at 
home. Nearly two thousand clergymen passed si- 
lently into the English Church, to teach every thing 
Roman except the Primacy of Rome ; and the ser- 
vices of this powerful ambuscade against the march 
and fortresses of the Reformation, are quietly accept- 
ed in every diocese of the land : twelve Romish 
priests do but change their title and their dress, and 
the whole bench of bishops is convulsed. Why is 
this? and what means the language in which the 
change is denounced as an " aggression," a " usurpa- 
tion," an " invasion " ? " Usurpation " is the violent 
seizure of power from the sole rightful possessor; 
and when such an act is charged, it implies that the 
accuser is smarting under the feelings of injured le- 
gitimacy. The anger of the clergy arises from their 
holding the very same doctrine with their oppo- 
nents; viz. that on the same spot there cannot be 
more than one bishop ; that, if two appear, one or 
the other must be a pretender, and must be got rid 
of, unless both are to become ridiculous ; that the 
very nature of their office is lost if the title be dis- 



408 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

tributed. If the episcopal form of church govern- 
ment were held simply as the best human contri- 
vance for maintaining the order of a Christian com- 
munity, there would be no conceivable reason why 
one denomination after another should not be 
thought free to adopt it ; and those who admired it 
would naturally rejoice to see their own judgment 
and preference confirmed by the concurrence and 
practice of other bodies of disciples. That the op- 
posite feeling prevails, convicts our Church of hold- 
ing Episcopacy as a supernatural institution, and of 
claiming the very same perpetual apostleship which 
is maintained by the Romish theory. In a new 
bishop is seen, not a superintendent of a separate 
class of religious societies, but a rival assertor of the 
same indivisible authority. What now does that 
authority include ? The exclusive possession of all 
the means of grace; the sole power of transmitting 
the Holy Spirit ; the nomination of trustees for the 
divine sacraments, of the stewards of absolution and 
the remission of sins. The sacerdotalism of the 
English Church is as absolute as that of the Ro- 
man. It matters little whether the sacraments be 
more or fewer ; whether their modus operandi be a 
little more subjective or a little more objective ; 
whether the right to absolve be used with the healthy 
or only with the sick, — so long as a ritual purifica- 
tion of human nature is pronounced indispensable, 
and the patent-right to effect it is conceded by a jus 
divinum to a certain body of men, the whole mis- 
chief of the Papal scheme remains. The discon- 
nection from Rome simply renders the evil provin- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 409 

cial instead of universal ; but the malady, by becom- 
ing insular instead of continental, does not abate its 
danger. In every form and in every degree, media- 
torial persons intrusted with mediatorial substances, 
and standing with supernatural incantations between 
man and God, are perilous to the well-being of the 
State. They occupy a position above the law: they 
constitute a polity distinct from the civil organiza- 
tion, and are never content till it is subordinated to 
their ends. No statesman can expect ecclesiastic 
peace till every trace of priestly doctrine is removed 
from the formularies of the Church, as it already is 
from the heart of the nation ; and the sacramental 
offices retained from the Pontifical Church be re- 
duced to the simply memorial rites of the Helvetic 
Reformation. No clergy can expect free action in 
alliance with the State, so long as they claim func- 
tions involving the irresponsible supremacy of their 
order. On the theological evidence of the sacerdo- 
tal system we pronounce no opinion, but of its po- 
litical bearings there can scarcely be a doubt : — it 
disqualifies any religion for being the established re- 
ligion. It would be difficult for any government to 
take the twelve Apostles into its pay, were they liv- 
ing in Europe now. Their miraculous gifts and the 
movements of their inspiration would spurn the con- 
ditions imposed by a Chancellor of the Exchequer 
or a Minister of Public Instruction. Parliamentary 
committees on their missionary expenses, and blue- 
book reports on their x a P l< J"H' aTa ^ would seem an intol- 
erable indignity : Mr. Roebuck would be a thorn in 
the flesh, and Mr. Bright a messenger of Satan to 
35 



410 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

buffet them. It cannot be otherwise with apostolic 
men, like Henry of Exeter and the holy Incumbent 
of St. Barnabas. Charged in this world with a di- 
vine mission, they are above being judged by man's 
judgment; and, before the tribunal of the nation, 
feel like Christ before the bar of Pilate. Trustees 
of a supernatural endowment, and in its disposal 
acting as organs of the Holy Ghost, they can make 
no terms with secular men, who think, like Simon 
Magus, "that the gift of God may be purchased 
with money." Agents of a heavenly polity for rul- 
ing the souls of men, they are bound, by paramount 
obligation, to guard and administer the precise form 
of dogma committed to them ; receiving it pure from 
the Church, and neither judging it themselves nor 
suffering others to judge it. This class of ecclesias- 
tics are very provoking to the statesman. They ap- 
pear perverse and obstinate. He cannot moderate 
them ; with a nucleus of incomprehensible pride 
covered by a surface of unctuous meekness, they 
slip through his fingers, and pursue their course. 
His canons of reason and theirs are hopelessly at 
variance ; — their respective modes of thought never 
meet; and the longer they negotiate, the less do 
they agree. The statesman, less enduring than the 
ecclesiastic, and wielding the keen instruments of 
decisive coercion, grows angry, and cuts short the 
controversy by an ultimatum of obedience or exclu- 
sion. He can do nothing else, without betraying 
the best interests of the nation. Yet we must say, 
that in being subjected to his ban, and held up to 
the indignation of the people, the Anglicans are very 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 411 

hardly used. It is a shameful tyranny to retain their 
doctrine in the Prayer-book, and then abuse them 
for believing it; to bind them by solemn engage- 
ment to a sacerdotal theory, and then lose all tem- 
per when they reduce it to practice ; to say to them, 
as each enters his office, " "Whose sins thou dost for- 
give, they are forgiven ; and whose sins thou dost 
retain, they are retained," and then be offended at 
their lofty airs. It is undeniable that the sacramen- 
tal and priestly doctrine embodied in the Anglican 
movement is fully authorized by the formularies of 
the Church, and that no clergyman who disbelieves 
it can have given a veracious " assent and consent," 
"willingly and ex animo" "to all things contained 
in them." There is no more ground for charging dis- 
honesty on the Anglican party than on the Evangel- 
ical. Each finds its justification in a part — neither 
in the whole — of the Liturgy and Articles of the 
Church; but the Anglicans being in the minority, 
and tending in a direction with which the nation 
does not sympathize, are treated with opprobrium as 
traitors to the faith. We believe them to be the most 
pernicious men of all within the compass of the 
Church ; but also the most sincere, the most learned, 
the most self-denying ; the most faithful, intellectu- 
ally and morally, to the ecclesiastical training which 
has been provided for them. Had it been possible 
for them to win over the majority of the nation to 
their views, and had logical considerations any 
weight with the tribunal of popular opinion, they 
would have been regarded, not as the insidious cor- 
rupters of the Church, but as the consistent restor- 



412 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

ers of its characteristic principles. Their fate is deter- 
mined by historical combinations, rather than by any 
essential principle of justice. But in sacrificing 
them, let no wrong be done : let the act be one, not 
of disgrace upon persons, but of preference for a 
principle: let the expulsion be, of priesthood from 
the Prayer-book, not of priests from the altars they 
have served. In driving them to the Vatican, the 
Church which has nurtured them in Romish tastes, 
committed them to Romish pretension, and shut 
them up in a University the very focus of mediaeval 
revival, owes them some reparation : nor could she 
present a more fitting apology than the erasure from 
her own system of every line that has misled these 
erring sons. 

Unless this be done, and the State decisively re- 
fuses to recognize the Church as a supernatural cor- 
poration, the evil will perpetually recur. The de- 
mand for ecclesiastical supremacy and independence, 
however dangerous, is irresistibly reasonable, if the 
Church be the holder of a commission, and the per- 
former of a work which no human power can touch. 
Concede this claim, and the national control becomes 
a manifest tyranny ; and if the control be optional, 
the claim must be denied. Hence the emphasis 
with which all " Churchmen " dwell on the treasure 
of " dogma and sacraments " consigned to the guar- 
dianship of the Church ; and on the right, thence aris- 
ing, of a lofty bearing towards the temporal power. 

" The State claims the allegiance of its subjects on the 
ground of the tangible benefits of which it is the instrument 
towards them. Its strength lies in this undeniable fact, and 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 413 

they endure and they maintain its coercion and its laws, be- 
cause the certainty of this fact is ever present to their minds. 
What mean the array and the pomp which surround the 
sovereign ? The strict ceremonial, the minute etiquette, 
the almost unsleeping watchfulness which eyes her every 
motion, which follows her into her garden and her chamber, 
which notes down every shade of her countenance, and 
every variation of her pulse ? Why do her soldiers hover 
about her, and officials line her anterooms, and cannon 
and illumination carry forward her progresses among the 
people ? Is this all a mockery ? Is it done for nothing ? 
Surely not ; in her is centred the order, the security, the 
happiness of a great people. And, in like manner, the 
Church must be the guardian of a fact ; she must have 
something to produce, she must have something to do. It 
is not enough to be keeper of even an inspired book ; for 
there is nothing to show that her protection of it is neces- 
sary at this day. The State might fairly commit its cus- 
tody to the art of printing, and dissolve an institution whose 
occupation was no more. She must do that, in order to 
have a meaning, which otherwise cannot be done ; which 
she alone can do. She must have a benefit to bestow, in 
order to be worth her existence ; and the benefit must be a 
fact which no one can doubt about. It must not be an opin- 
ion, or matter of opinion, but a something which is like a 
first principle, which may be taken for granted, — a foun- 
dation indubitable and irresistible. In other words, she 
must have a dogma and sacraments ; it is a dogma and sac- 
raments, and nothing else, which can give meaning to a 
Church, or sustain her against the State ; for by these are 
meant certain facts or acts which are special instruments of 
spiritual goool to those who receive them. As we do not 
gain the benefits of civil society unless we submit to its 
laws and customs, so we do not gain the spiritual blessings 
35* 



414 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

which the Church has to bestow upon us unless we receive 
her dogmas and her sacraments." — Newman's Lectures, 
p. 178. 

This is the pretended basis of the English, no less 
than of the Roman Church. The pretence is palpa- 
bly false ; all consistent teaching being utterly lost, 
the sacraments having become the centres of heret- 
ical disputes, and the inconsistencies of the formula- 
ries laid open to public exposure. The Act of Uni- 
formity, it is now confessed, enforces a heterogeneous 
congeries of theological propositions with no organic 
unity, held together by no higher bond than the 
printer's frame of types, and incapable of coexisting 
in any mind of logical grasp and moral earnestness 
to use it ; and the only uniformity which it secures 
among the clergy, beyond the weekly monotony 
upon the ear, is that of invariable self-contradiction, 
of partial unveracity, and bitter mutual aversions. 
Nevertheless, absurd as the pretence is, of a supernat- 
ural trust of dogma in the keeping of our ecclesias- 
tics, it has not been relieved of its mischief in being 
bereft of its truth. It operates powerfully against 
the most salutary and moderate reforms. It refuses 
to recognize the fact, impressed on the whole course 
of history and necessitated by the very constitution 
of the human mind, that religious faith cannot be 
made immutable except under the humiliating con- 
dition of universal ignorance and apathy; but re- 
quires, from time to time, new intellectual forms for 
its sincere expression. It affects to shrink from every 
doctrinal modification, as the breach of an eternal 
trust, and, to evade the confession of fallibility, will 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 415 

repeal nothing even of what has passed into desue- 
tude or disgust. This hollow profession of an unreal 
unity and fixedness most unfavorably influences the 
character and culture of the clergy. The national 
life of England has been particularly productive of 
fresh and eccentric varieties of religious activity, 
which the sturdy realism and moral energy of her 
people have not permitted to spend themselves in 
speculation or to sleep in books, but have pushed 
foward to take the command of events. From the 
Precisians of Queen Elizabeth's reign to the Free 
Church believers of Queen Victoria's, there has 
been a series of intellectual movements connected 
with religion, so important as to color the whole 
complexion of our history. But as these have, for 
the most part, been suffered to take place outside the 
Church, they are not in favor with the clergy ; and 
whatever part of the infection of change has spread 
at times to the interior, is so disturbing to the theory 
of a doctrinal stewardship, that the periods marked 
by it lie under disgrace. The clerical habit, there- 
fore, is to ignore the entire existence of Noncon- 
formity ; to treat it precisely as the Pope now treats 
the established schism ; to walk through history like 
a coxcomb through a ball-room, eying his nearest 
neighbors as if he had never seen them, and looking 
another way when an inconvenient acquaintance ap- 
proaches. By rights, he appears to think, such peo- 
ple have no business to be there at all; he would 
never have allowed it, had it rested with him : but 
the admissions were settled at St. Stephen's; and 
with such a miscellaneous committee of manage- 



416 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

ment as that, one cannot be surprised at any thing. 
Often, indeed, it may well happen that the clergy- 
man has only an obscure and hearsay belief in the 
reality of Dissenters. His father, the rector of a 
country place, " never allowed them in his parish." 
At Oxford, the phenomenon was invisible, and never 
mentioned. In his studies, the youth had never been 
referred to any Nonconformist books, though, in get- 
ting up the history of heresies, he had heard of some 
great discomfitures inflicted on them by orthodox 
bishops. And now he is curate in a village, from 
which, a month before he came, the only Dissenter — 
a Baptist cobbler — had removed, because there was 
no school but the " National," and he would not let 
his children learn the Church Catechism. And so, 
of the stirring religious life of the conventicle, which 
gathers into it so much of the energy of the middle 
classes, and still more of the unreligious and alien- 
ated life of the classes below this, the academic 
Churchman knows nothing. Unless his lot be cast 
in a large town, he lives in a social world little dis- 
turbed by the new spirit of the present century, and 
where he may cherish the ideas of an obsolete gen- 
eration. Nor is it only in his narrow view of his 
own time that the professional perversion is seen : it 
corrupts still more conspicuously his estimates of the 
past, and generates historical tastes dishonorable to 
men of English birth. Dreaming of dogmatic unity 
as the indispensable mark of the Church, and find- 
ing no clear and steady traces of it in the last three 
centuries, nor much pretence of it, except in the 
Romish and Anglican communions, he carries all his 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 417 

admirations up, along the narrow path of Episco- 
pacy, into the mediaeval period, and through it to the 
dreary ages when ecclesiastic consolidation took up 
the crumbling Empire of the West. The august 
image of an indivisible Christendom, instructed by 
the fathers, represented by the Councils, ruled by the 
Head of the Church, accompanies and fascinates 
him ; and we know of no preconception so powerful 
as this to pervert all history, to spoil all purity and 
manliness of taste, and to produce a state of mind 
uncongenial with what is noblest in the actual life 
of this nineteenth century. He sees, upon a writer 
the most mean and tedious, the imprimatur of eccle- 
siastical adoption, and wastes upon him the rever- 
ence due to thought and genius. He allows dog- 
matic grounds to determine all his judgments of 
human character and literary merit : the silliness of 
Epiphanius escapes him, lest a needful witness be 
lost: for fear of encouraging Jovinan, Jerome's fa- 
natic passions must have their way: the apprehen- 
sion of Arius makes every thing in Athanasius 
" great " : and the presence of Pelagius excuses Au- 
gustine's persecuting zeal. The bald grossness of 
the Ambrosian hymns is extolled for simplicity and 
grandeur; and the conceits of Marbod and Hildebert 
for poetic richness and fertility. Anselm becomes 
the model of a philosopher ; Aquinas, of a theolo- 
gian ; and Bernard, of a saint. Kings and emperors 
are estimated, not by their capacity and virtues, but 
by their orthodoxy : Constantine, the murderer of all 
his kindred, Theodosius, who desolated the streets 
of Antioch and Thessalonica with frightful and 



418 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

almost gratuitous massacres, are applauded as 
" great," because they were prodigal to the clergy, 
and merciless to heretics. In every contest between 
the ecclesiastical and temporal power, the " Church- 
man's " sympathies go with the former, and, without 
regard to any merits of the dispute, he visibly glo- 
ries in the abasement of the crown before the mitre ; 
it is a triumph to him/that to the family of Valentin- 
ianthe Second, and to the Emperor himself, because 
he was an Arian, every church in Milan was denied, 
and from the Basilica the chant of St. Ambrose, 
ceaseless by night or day, defied the soldiers of the 
prince ; and he loves to read how Becket extorted 
penance from the king. But above all, he holds in 
greatest antipathy the whole system of influences 
under which the constitutional liberties of modern 
England have been matured. The Reformation 
under Luther and Melancthon, Calvin and Zwingle, 
is contemptuously disclaimed as a vulgar insurrec- 
tion of private judgment; so that any sympathy 
with Continental Protestantism has long become the 
recognized mark of a Dissenter. The whole cluster 
of modern churches is swept scornfully away, with 
the pedantic remark, that they are only a reproduc- 
tion by ignorant men of the ancient heresies : over 
which orthodoxy, supernaturally triumphant once, 
will return in full tide again. English Churchmen 
describe the Presbyterianism of the North, as " that 
form of schism which is established in Scotland." 
New literary idols are set up even among the writers 
of their own communion, and many of the older 
potentates dethroned. Of the elder divines, the 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 419 

High- Churchmen are alone in favor, Andrewes and 
Laud, Jackson and Cosin ; and of the more recent, 
the nonjurors awaken the strongest interest, Brett, 
and Ken, and Beveridge. 

The praises of such men as Ridley and Parkhurst, 
who would have brought Zurich and London into 
the fraternity of a common reformation, are no long- 
er heard. Tillotson, having proposed a scheme of 
large-hearted comprehension, is regarded as a traitor 
to the primacy which he adorned. And in propor- 
tion as any divine has enlarged his range as a theo- 
logian on the side of philosophy, he is set aside, with 
Cudworth and Clarke, as a miserable latitudinarian. 
In regard to every political struggle by which the 
nation has obtained fresh guaranties of civil liberty 
or made a new step in religious toleration, it is fash- 
ionable for " good Churchmen " in our days to sym- 
pathize with the doctrines of servility and oppression. 
Clarendon himself could find no fault with the mod- 
ern clerical view of " the Great Rebellion " ; and the 
settlement in 1688 is regarded as the ill-omened com- 
mencement of that fatal series of changes by which, 
through the removal of tests, Parliament has become 
a medley of heresies, and the Church laid prostrate 
before Quakers, Papists, and Socinians. In our lit- 
erature, there is scarce a name venerable to the 
popular ear, which is ever mentioned by this class 
of men without a gloss of disparagement. Milton, 
unfortunately, was neither orthodox nor prelatist. 
Locke set the fashion of that presumptuous reliance 
on experience, which is the root of all infidelity ; and 
brought into vogue that sophistical "toleration," 



420 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

which amounts to " total indifference to all objective 
truth." Bunyan is abandoned to the coarser imagina- 
tion of the Nonconformist, while Thomas-a-Kempis is 
fitter for the pocket of an Anglican. The world could 
better have spared Adam Smith than have suffered 
the dreadful blights of Political Economy. This sort 
of taste, which for twenty years has been fostered in 
the University Churchman, sets him down as a 
stranger in this trading, bustling, practical England. 
He looks with simple alarm and aversion on the 
characteristic life of the age, its vast material devel- 
opment, its irresistible and crushing growth of mech- 
anism, physical and human, its swarming towns, 
its distracting mills, its noisy agitations, its teeming 
press, its chaos of beliefs and unbeliefs. In the days 
of Queen Bess, it was not thought unfitting for re- 
ligious men to share in the national pride awakened 
by expanding prosperity and power; but in our time 
an ecclesiastical cant has arisen against all the mark- 
ing features and moral results of the immense pro- 
ductive power and commercial complications of the 
empire. We are not blind to the embarrassing so- 
cial problems springing out of these conditions ; but 
there is no solution to be found in sneering at the 
politics of Manchester, and treating the "West Riding 
as a pandemonium. When the appointed guides 
of the people despair, it is a confession of incapacity. 
In these smoky towns, too, under the very shadow of 
the mill, they have but to deal with men, each with 
a heart in his bosom and a faculty of thought in his 
soul. If danger there be, it is that, though the new 
forces and enlarged quantities of society be not in 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 421 

themselves too strong, the old Church provisions for 
directing and organizing them are quite too weak, 
and may be shattered and humbled in the attempt. 
In reading the writings of modern " Churchmen," 
nothing strikes us so forcibly as the intense antipathy 
to every thing distinctively national. The Lectures 
of Father Newman abound in bitter sarcasms on the 
" free-born, self-dependent, animal mind of the Eng- 
lishman," who will have no " restrictions put upon 
grace, when he has thrown open trade, removed dis- 
abilities, abolished monopolies, taken off agricultural 
protection, and enlarged the franchise." These Lec- 
tures are indeed written by a Roman Catholic ; but 
they were addressed to Anglicans, and by one who 
has superlative skill in the selection of topics adapted 
to their tastes. The following passage is a fair speci- 
men of the ecclesiastical feeling towards English 
life, described under the theological sobriquet, " the 
world." 

" Were it to my present purpose to attack the principles 
and proceedings of the world, of course it would be obvious 
for me to retort upon the cold, cruel, selfish system, which 
this supreme worship of comfort, decency, and social order 
necessarily introduces ; to show you how the many are sac- 
rificed to the few, the poor to the wealthy, how an oligar- 
chical monopoly of enjoyment is established far and wide, 
and the claims of want, and pain, and sorrow, and affliction, 
and guilt, and misery are practically forgotten. But I will 
not have recourse to the commonplaces of controversy 
while I am on the defensive. All I would say to the world 
is, Keep your theories to yourself, do not inflict them up- 
on the sons of Adam everywhere ; do not measure heaven 
36 



422 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

and earth by views which are in a great degree insular, and 
never can be philosophical and Catholic. You do your work, 
perhaps, in a more business-like way, compared with our- 
selves, but we are immeasurably more tender, and gentle, 
and angelic. We come to poor human nature as the angels 
of God, and you as policemen. Look at your poor-houses, 
lunatic asylums, and prisons ; how perfect are their exter- 
nals, what skill and ingenuity appear in their structure, 
economy, and administration ; they are as decent, and bright, 
and calm as what our Lord seems to name them, — dead 
men's sepulchres. Yes ! they have all the world can give, 
all but life ; all but a heart. Yes ! you can hammer up a 
coffin ; you can plaster a tomb ; you are nature's under- 
takers ; you cannot build it a home. You cannot feed it, 
or heal it ; it lies, like Lazarus, at your gate, full of sores. 
You see it gasping and panting with privations and penal- 
ties ; and you sing to it, you dance to it, you show it your 
picture-books, you let off your fire-works, you open your 
menageries. Shallow philosophers ! Is this mode of going 
on so winning and persuasive, that we should imitate it ? " — 
Lectures, p. 209. 

This invective against all secular forms of com- 
passion towards want and suffering addresses itself 
to a feeling exceedingly lively, we fear, among the 
priesthood of the English Church. They certainly 
are free from the lecturer's reproach ; for who ever 
found them singing and dancing to poor human na- 
ture, plying it with picture-books, or even, to any 
great extent, with the alphabet? Whatever has 
been done of this profane kind is really not to be 
laid at their door. They were no partners to Joseph 
Lancaster's zeal for spelling, apart from regeneration ; 
and had it depended on them, not an unbaptized 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 423 

man, from the Cheviot to the Channel, would, to 
this hour, have been able to sign his name. They 
were guiltless of abetting Raikes's project for Sab- 
bath-breaking schools ; and, if they could, would 
have kept the precincts of every place of worship pure 
from the sacrilegious presence of slate or copy-book. 
Dr. Birkbeck did not complain of any rivalry from 
them in the establishment of Mechanics' Institutes ; 
nor are the cheap concerts, and zoological gardens, 
which are so painful to the son of St. Philip Neri, 
peculiarly clerical establishments. There were chap- 
lains to the prisons — those whited sepulchres — 
before the time of Howard and Elizabeth Fry; the 
places were perhaps quite as sepulchral, but they 
were certainly less white. In fact, lay the poor Laz- 
arus at the gate of the Romish and of the English 
priest, and what is the difference ? The one will 
confess him ; the other, reading to him the service for 
the visitation of the sick, will " move him to con- 
fess " ; and both will give him absolution. Neither 
of these "comes to poor human nature" exactly 
" like a policeman " ; neither of them, we devoutly 
hope, is much " like the angels of God " : but what- 
ever the one is, the other is surely not dissimilar; and 
the lecturer's sacerdotal sarcasms against the meth- 
ods of secular benevolence and social administra- 
tion express the spirit and temper of them both. 
The only difference is, that the priestly element is 
less ascendant in the English than in the Roman 
system, and that our Church is politically too de- 
pendent on the nation not to be distinctly affected by 
national sentiments. Instead, therefore, of absolutely 



424 MARTINEAll's MISCELLANIES. 

blocking them out at their origin, after the fashion 
of an Austrian or Bavarian priesthood, our cler- 
gy (notwithstanding honorable exceptions) obstruct 
their course and hang upon their rear, and follow 
with antipathy the movements of a generous lay 
sentiment which it is their place to guide with sym- 
pathy. It is undeniable that into every social im- 
provement, every extension of mixed education, every 
removal of religious exclusion, which has character- 
ized the last half-century, the Church has been 
reluctantly dragged. They have been found against 
the changes which the prevailing feeling of the coun- 
try, which Parliament, which statesmen, which his- 
tory, must regard as the best features of the age. 
"Were this a truly devout conservatism, the enthusi- 
asm of self-devotion arresting the downward course 
of a degenerate time, we could joyfully do homage 
to their fatal zeal in clinging to the untenable. But 
who can pretend to discover in it any trace of the 
prophet's quick instinct for good and ill ? — who deny 
that its only steady principle has been the priest's 
tenacity of threatened power ? If there is a spot in 
the empire which may fairly be regarded as the in- 
most shrine of the Church, authorized to express its 
genius and will, that spot is Oxford. Some century 
and a quarter ago, John Wesley was Fellow of Lin- 
coln College and Greek Lecturer there. With a 
few companions, recoiling, like himself, from the prof- 
ligate habits of the place, he took to heart the 
appeals of Law's " Serious Call," and resolved to 
live with the invisible realities which with others 
served but for a stately dream or a mocking jest. 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 425 

In the cold midnight, beneath the truthful sky, he 
struggled for a faith worthy of so great a sight. He 
prayed without ceasing; he fasted in secret; he 
passed the mystery on from his own heart to the 
souls of others; and led the saintly life with less 
offence to creed and prejudice, than almost any 
devotee in history. The son of a High- Church rec- 
tor, he could not be charged with unsacramental 
doctrine or Nonconformist sympathies; he denied 
the Christian baptism of Dissenters, and drove them 
from the communion as unregenerate. He duly 
proved his spirit of self-sacrifice by preferring a mis- 
sion to the Indians of Georgia to a parochial provis- 
ion at home, and the fraternity of the poor Hernn- 
huter to the aristocratic priesthood of England. 
The sequel is well known; how he took up the 
labors, while others boasted of the privileges, of 
Apostleship ; civilized whole counties ; lifted brutal 
populations into communities of orderly citizens and 
consistent Christians ; and in grandeur of missionary 
achievement rivalled the most splendid successes of 
Christendom. With what eye did the Church, as 
the Mother, and the University, as the Nurse, of so 
much greatness, look upon his career? Did they 
avail themselves of his gifts, bless Heaven for the 
timely mission of such rare graces, and heap on him 
the work which he was so eager to do, and they so 
much needed to get done ? Did they found an order 
to bear his name and propagate his activity ? He 
coveted their support ; and so clung to their alliance, 
that seldom has a strong enthusiasm been com- 
bined with such moderation. But in their most 
36* 



426 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

favorable mood, they did but stare and stand aloof. 
It was in vain to look to the clergy for their help ; 
he was driven to a lay organization, and even a lay 
ministry; the Wesleyan Chapel became the rival, 
instead of the auxiliary, of the Parish Church ; and 
the most loyal of all popular religious bodies was 
absolutely repulsed from conformity. When the 
leaders, with a cart for their pulpit and a field for 
their church, provoked the vices and passions they 
denounced, and were stoned and carried off to prison, 
the rector was less likely to be their intercessor than 
their judge. And in Wesley's college days, where 
the premonition of his religious movement was dis- 
tinctly given, he met no wisdom and affection to 
protect him from the scorn of the learned and the 
laughter of the rich. The Apostle of popular piety 
was repudiated and contemned. 

Early in 1829, the Duke of Wellington became 
convinced that the fit moment had arrived for termi- 
nating the contest between the British Government 
and the Catholic Association, by removing the polit- 
ical disabilities affecting nearly one third of the sub- 
jects of the empire. Sir Robert Peel had represented 
in Parliament the University of Oxford, and on 
adopting the resolution to act in conjunction with 
the Duke of Wellington, resigned his seat, and asked 
from his constituents a verdict upon his new opin- 
ions. It was a significant election. Had the attach- 
ment to a tolerant policy been strong, the conversion 
to it of the most practical statesmen of the day 
would have been readily accepted as an assurance 
that state expediency, instead of hindering, impera- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 427 

tively demanded its application. Had the spirit of 
exclusiveness been weak, — a mere waning tradition 
ready to die out, — there was an unexampled oppor- 
tunity of discarding it without danger, if not without 
reproach ; for the Universities were expressly except- 
ed from the new sphere of honor open to the Catho- 
lics. The result is not forgotten. The confidence 
of Oxford was transferred from Sir Robert Peel to 
Sir Robert H. Inglis : and a disinterested testimony 
borne against all concession of religious liberty. 

But perhaps nothing else could be expected from 
such an institution, — the great guardian of our 
Reformed Church. Perhaps the traditions of 1687 
were too vividly preserved, and the tower of Magda- 
lene was too visible a monument of danger from 
Roman Catholic aggression, to permit the least 
negotiation with so insidious a faith. Under the 
tyranny of James the Second, had not Popish prin- 
ciples been imported into the place, been taught by 
the Fellows, proclaimed in the chapel, and occupied 
the Bishop's throne ? And must not a body which 
had carried on a contest with a king in such a cause 
be jealous of its Protestant repute ; and, having with- 
stood the Declaration of Indulgence, protest against 
the Act of Emancipation ? Let the answer be given 
by events. Four years after the election of 1829, 
began to issue from Oxford a series of publications, 
in which the whole Protestant theory of religion was 
assailed from its foundation ; the Reformation treated 
as a sacrilegious rebellion ; the Continental churches 
disowned ; the Patristic theology declared authori- 
tative; private judgment solemnly renounced; and 



428 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

Christianity rested on Apostolic succession, sacer- 
dotal prerogative, and sacramental grace. It seemed 
a bold undertaking to spring up in the very fortress 
of the national Protestantism ; the rash prowess, 
perhaps, of solitary and miscalculating zeal, secure of 
instant rebuke from the spirit of the place. Time 
has undeceived us. So congenial did the Academic 
influences prove, that the leaders in the movement 
appeal to their success, as too wonderful for natural 
persuasion, and giving visible evidence of miracle. 
Not undergraduates alone worked into the fervors of 
romance ; but fellows, tutors, preachers, and profes- 
sors joined the Catholic revival; prelates were soon 
found among their ranks ; and, were any one curious 
to compare the creed of Parker with that of Wilber- 
force, it might remain doubtful whether episcopacy 
in Oxford was much more Protestant in 1850 than 
in 1687. At all events, hundreds of clergymen have 
learned, in colleges speaking the voice of the Church, 
principles which throw contempt on our revolt from 
Rome, and on all that we have won from the six- 
teenth century to the present hour. Oxford, so reso- 
lute against the Pope's Catholics, could gently nurse 
her own. Sacerdotal claims were dangerous only in 
rival and in foreign hands. She fosters them against 
the English nation ; but keeps them all within the 
English Church. Thus have three opportunities 
been given to the greatest of our ecclesiastical insti- 
tutions, to declare itself in relation to the deepest 
national interests, — Methodism, Toleration, Sacer- 
dotalism. It pronounces against any day of Pente- 
cost for the people ; against any relaxation of dis- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 429 

abling laws on account of religion ; and encourages 
priestly pretension in its own communion. 

The operation of this spirit is the more to be 
deplored, because it determines the temper of the 
higher classes of English society. Politicians, we 
are aware, are accustomed to calculate on the as- 
cendency over the clergy of lay, and especially of 
aristocratic influences. And no doubt the system of 
patronage, and the opinions of wealthy and powerful 
parishioners, cannot be without their effect on the 
clergyman. But in quiet times, and in the long run, 
the mental action, we are persuaded, is prevailingly in 
the opposite direction. The squire is usually a man 
of less activity of thought than the curate or the 
vicar; and, beyond a certain range of political judg- 
ments to which he is pledged by habit and profes- 
sion, is not likely to resist the steady pressure of 
sentiment from the most intelligent and venerated 
authority in his vicinity. The remark applies still 
more strongly to the ladies of his family. Hence, 
whatever tendency exists actively in the clergy, im- 
presses itself on the great body of the country gen- 
tlemen and noble houses ; and should the tendency 
be unfortunately in contradiction to the predominant 
bias of the nation, dangerous social divisions are 
produced. The aristocratic contempt felt towards 
Nonconformists and their institutions is mischiev- 
ously enhanced by this cause. The picture which 
Mr. Miall draws, in the following sentences, of cler- 
ical influence in the rural districts, is not free from 
exaggeration ; and, in referring the evil to state en- 
dowment, he appears to us to mistake the nature of 



430 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

the malady; but we presume he expresses the prev- 
alent feeling of the Dissenters, and must be received 
as an unexceptionable witness to their occasional 
experience. 

" This legalized ecclesiasticism, claiming exclusive right 
to dispense God's Gospel to the people of these realms, and 
casting contempt on all unauthorized effort, puts itself into 
jealous and active antagonism to the Christian zeal which 
sends forth into our neglected towns, and amongst our stolid 
peasantry, laborers of various denominations, for the pur- 
pose of rescuing immortal souls from a cruel and fatal 
bondage. Every one familiarly acquainted with our rural 
districts can bear witness to facts in proof of this position. 
Go into almost any village in the empire, and set yourself 
down there to win souls to Christ ; and your bitterest foe, 
your most energetic and untiring opponent, will prove to 
be the clergyman, — the state-appointed minister of Jesus 
Christ. The very first symptoms of spiritual life which 
show themselves among his parishioners — social meetings 
for prayer, anxious inquiries for the way of salvation, eager 
attention to the proclamations of the Gospel — will attract 
his vigilant notice, and provoke his severest censure. The 
thing is so common, and has been so from time immemo- 
rial, as to cease to excite surprise. Would you stir up in 
men's minds serious concern respecting their highest inter- 
ests, the parish ' priest ' will be sure to cross your path at 
every step. Gather around you the children of the poor, to 
instil into their young and susceptible hearts the truths of 
the Gospel, and instantly their parents are threatened with 
a forfeiture of all claims upon parochial charity. Circulate 
from house to house plain, pungent, religious tracts, and in 
your second or third visit you will learn that the vicar has 
forbidden their reception. Assemble a few men and women 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 431 

4 perishing for lack of knowledge,' that you may preach 
to them the message of reconciliation, and ten to one you 
will be informed, in the course of a few weeks, that the oc- 
cupant of the house in which you labored has been served 
with a notice to quit. It matters nothing that your efforts 
are free from all tinge of sectarianism, they are regarded 
as intrusive, irregular, and mischievous. How many vil- 
lages are there in this country, in which, through clerical 
influence, it is impossible to hire, a room, within the narrow 
walls of which to proclaim to rustic ignorance the tidings of 
eternal life ! How many more in which, from the same 
cause, misrepresentation, intimidation, and oppressive pow- 
er are brought to bear upon miserable and helpless depend- 
ents, and to scare them beyond the reach of the gladsome 
sound of mercy ! How many millions of souls, hemmed in 
on all sides by this worldly system of religion, cry aloud 
from the depths of their ruin to earnest Christians for help, 
whom, nevertheless, State-churchism renders it impossible 
to reach ! It was, doubtless, with this melancholy picture 
before his eyes, that Mr. Binney so emphatically pronounced 
his opinion, — fully justified, I think, by the facts of the case, 
— that the Church of England destroys more souls than she 
saves." — p. 369. 

We are brought back, from whatever aspect of our 
ecclesiastical affairs we choose to study, to the one 
evil which impresses all foreign observers of the An- 
glican Establishment, and which recent events ren- 
der so conspicuous, — its sacerdotal character. The 
Church might be excessive in its endowments, aris- 
tocratic in its connections, narrow in its creed ; but 
did it pretend to nothing but to be the Nation's 
Church, these things might easily be mended by the 
nation's will. It is the claim of a supernatural char- 



432 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

acter, that renders its exclusiveness at once hopeless 
and intangible. So long as this claim remains un- 
effaced, no statesman will be able to deal success- 
fully with the ecclesiastical problems presented to 
him, and must be checkmated in every game he 
plays with the Episcopacy. We do not say whether 
the claim be true or false ; but we do say, that the 
Church which refuses to withdraw it is ipso facto 
disqualified for recognition as the establishment in a 
nation of mixed religions. Prohibited by its princi- 
ples from becoming comprehensive, it must be con- 
tent with a position less than national. It is the sa- 
cerdotal doctrine which involves the whole subject 
of the Royal Supremacy in such miserable confusion, 
and renders the constitutional phraseology of the 
Tudor times wholly inadequate to the exigencies of 
the present day.* When Henry the Eighth re- 
quired from convocation an acknowledgment of his 
prerogative as supreme head of the Church in these 

* This is the " Oath of Supremacy " : — 

" I, A. B., do utterly testify and declare, that the Queen's highness 
is the only supreme governor of this realm, and all other her highness's 
dominions and countries, as well in all spiritual and ecclesiastical 
things or causes as temporal ; and that no foreign prince, person, pre- 
late, state, or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, 
superiority, preeminence, or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, with- 
in this realm ; and therefore I do utterly renounce and forsake all for- 
eign jurisdictions, powers, superiorities, and authorities, and do prom- 
ise that from henceforth I shall bear faith and true allegiance to the 
Queen's highness, her heirs and lawful successors, and to my power 
shall assist and defend all jurisdictions, preeminences, privileges, and 
authorities, granted or belonging to the Queen's highness, her heirs 
and successors, or united and annexed to the imperial crown of this 
realm." 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 433 

realms, his intention undoubtedly was to provide 
fully for the consequences of his breach with Rome, 
and to centre in the Crown all the prerogatives which 
it had hitherto shared with the Papacy. In the ap- 
pointment of bishops, he had already possessed the 
right of investing them with their temporalities ; he 
now acquired the right of conferring on them their 
spiritualities : and nothing remained in the whole 
process of making or unmaking bishops, to which 
his prerogative was inadequate. It was not meant 
by this to reduce the episcopal office to a mere state 
appointment ; else there would have been no occa- 
sion, on discarding the Pope, to assume any new 
power for the King. The purpose was not to lower, 
or in any way change the nature of Episcopacy, but 
to exalt the functions of Royalty by absorbing into 
it the spiritual rights disengaged from Rome. How 
the lineal Apostleship of the Supreme Pontiff, and 
the prerogatives inherent in St. Peter's chair, could 
be imported into the English monarchy, was not very 
clear. But the difficulty was got over by appeal to 
the divine right of kings; — a right not questioned 
in those days, and admitting of easy extension from 
the sphere of natural to that of Christian polity. In 
acknowledgment of the royal supremacy in this un- 
restricted sense, Cranmer and other bishops, on the 
accession of Edward the Sixth, renewed the tenure 
of their sees, by taking out commissions for holding 
them during the pleasure of the Crown. While this 
notion prevailed, and the sovereign, in addition to the 
functions of chief magistrate, held a pontifical charac- 
ter, room was left for the maintenance of Episcopacy, 
37 



434 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

as a divine institution, annexed to the sacred prerog- 
ative of the Crown, as the officers of state belonged 
to its civil dignity. In this sense, and in this only, is 
the royal supremacy extensive enough for its avowed 
end, namely, completely to block out the Pope from 
this kingdom. It soon occurred, however, to the strict- 
er reformers, that an oath of supremacy, constructed 
with such a meaning, contained two positions, — a 
negative one, that the Pope had not in England the 
supremacy he claimed ; and an affirmative one, that 
the sovereign had. The former they could cordial- 
ly take ; but the latter involved crown rights of con- 
secration and ordination which the school of Geneva 
scrupled to admit. It was important to gain their 
acquiescence ; and unimportant to insist strongly on 
any thing but the negative part of the oath. A fur- 
ther distinction was therefore drawn ; the spiritual 
prerogative, as conceived in its plenitude by Cran- 
mer, was divided into two elements, — the supernatu- 
ral or pontifical, in virtue of which the Crown would 
cease to be a lay power, and might confer divine offi- 
ces ; and the simply ecclesiastical, in virtue of which 
the judicial powers of the Crown were to be liable 
to no exceptions, and the canon as well as the civil 
law was to find its final interpreter upon the throne. 
By insisting only on the latter of these two, and ex- 
pressly disclaiming " authority and power of ministry 
of divine service in the Church," Elizabeth relieved 
the scruples of her Calvinistic subjects, and rendered 
the oath unobjectionable to all but Catholics.* The 

* See Hallam's Constitutional History, Vol. I. p. 152. 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 435 

consequences of this restriction of the spiritual su- 
premacy are curious. It no longer involves any 
thing which the Dissenter of the present day could 
hesitate to own : the jurisdiction of the Queen over 
all persons and in all causes which by law may be 
brought before ecclesiastical tribunals, is not a mat- 
ter which he is at all concerned to deny. Were au- 
thority claimed, indeed, over himself in the concerns 
of his religion, he would not acknowledge it; but 
no such claim is made; the concerns of his religion 
do not fall within the legal scope of " spiritual 
and ecclesiastical things and causes " : were they 
comprised within the terms of the oath at all, it 
would be under the designation of " things tem- 
poral " ; for as the Nonconformist minister is a lay- 
man, so we apprehend is his church, or his synod, 
a secular body in the eye of the law. But not even 
under this title are any affairs of dissenting con- 
science included : for the Queen's temporal suprem- 
acy goes only to the execution of the laws, and can- 
not encroach upon that which the law leaves free ; 
and this is the case with the Nonconformist's faith 
and worship. We conceive, therefore, that Cardi- 
nal Wiseman mistakes the purport of this crown 
prerogative, when he says : — 

" The royal supremacy is no more admitted by the Scotch 
kirk, by Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Independents, Pres- 
byterians, Unitarians, and other Dissenters, than by the Cath- 
olics. None of these recognize in the Queen any authority 
to interfere in their religious concerns, to appoint their min- 
isters for them, or to mark the limits of their separate dis- 
tricts, in which authority has to be exercised." — Appeal, 
Sec. I. 



436 MARTINEAlj's MISCELLANIES. 

Certainly, the sects in question recognize no such 
authority. But no such authority does the royal su- 
premacy include ; for where the law assumes no 
control, the Queen can have no jurisdiction. 

But why, in this view, need the Catholics them- 
selves object to take the oath ? The royal suprema- 
cy no more includes any power to appoint their bish- 
ops than to name a Methodist superintendent ; and 
might apparently be acknowledged, without preju- 
dice to the reserved rights of conscience, by Dr. Wise- 
man no less than by Dr. Bunting. A Presbyterian 
minister is tried for heterodoxy by a synod which 
hears the cause and decides by vote. A Catholic 
priest is accused of publishing an heretical book, 
carries his appeal to the Pope, and is required to re- 
cant. With neither process does the English law 
interfere ; and if on this account the Presbyterian 
trial is no infringement on the royal supremacy, how 
can the Papal decision be so ? The oath guards the 
sovereign as carefully (though less in extenso) from do- 
mestic as from foreign interferences with the prerog- 
ative ; and if it lets in the Synod can hardly keep 
out the Pope. In both cases the interposition of 
some other person than the Queen for the adjust- 
ment of a dispute, or the determination of a doubt, 
is of the nature of mere private influence, and no 
more constitutes a trespass on the royal supremacy, 
than the moral power of a father over sons who have 
attained their majority, or of arbitrators over dispu- 
tants resorting to them. The Catholic, therefore, is 
not hindered from taking the oath of supremacy by 
the spiritual allegiance which he owes to the Su- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 437 

preme Pontiff; for he can pay that allegiance, and 
freely move within the pale of his church affairs, 
without encountering the crown prerogative at all. 
There is no "divided allegiance " in submitting to a 
legally permitted influence. The real bar to the 
Catholic's taking the oath of supremacy lies else- 
where. That oath requires him to say, not simply 
that the Pope " has not," but that he " ought not to 
have any jurisdiction " within this realm ; and this 
is what he cannot affirm without giving the lie to 
his faith, which teaches him that the Pope, of divine 
right, is entitled to that appellate jurisdiction, which, 
for three centuries, England has improperly denied 
to him. In refusing the oath of supremacy, the 
Catholic must therefore be regarded, not as the jeal- 
ous guardian of his own spiritual allegiance, but as 
protester against others' spiritual defection. By the 
act of 1829, which sanctions his refusal and substi- 
tutes another form, the right is reserved to him of 
maintaining this protest; and of living in the State 
as a person who must always desire an ecclesiasti- 
cal restoration of the realm of Rome. 

Observe, finally, the operation on the Established 
Church of Elizabeth's lowered interpretation of her 
spiritual supremacy. The pontifical prerogative of 
the sovereign being thrown away, the divide rights 
of Episcopacy lose their support and go a-begging. 
Whither, now, are they to look for their legitimation ? 
Formerly they claimed in right of the Holy See. 
That title being cancelled, they held of the conse- 
crating power of the Crown. This having disap- 
peared, what becomes of them ? They ought, as 
37* 



438 MARTINEAlj's MISCELLANIES. 

dependents, to have shared the fall of their superior, 
and vanished from existence ; leaving to the bishop's 
office mere human functions of ecclesiastic adminis- 
tration, for which a civic nomination would serve as 
adequate credentials. But against this, the liturgies 
and offices of the Church were, and are, a standing 
and insuperable obstacle. Who was to say, " Re- 
ceive the Holy Ghost by the imposition of our 
hands " ? Who was to convey the stewardship of 
Sacramental Grace? Was the disposal of Regen- 
eration in the patronage of the Lord Privy Seal ; 
and the power of Absolution in the gift of the 
Wool-sack ? So long as these supernatural preten- 
sions formed an integral part of the Church theory, 
they must be vested somewhere, and pretenders 
would not be wanting. There were but two resour- 
ces, — to reaccept the authentication of Rome, or 
to transfer to the Anglican hierarchy, as a pontifical 
aristocracy, the prerogatives alienated from the mon- 
archy of St. Peter. In either case, the concession 
made by the Crown is of no profit to the kingdom : 
the claim resigned is simply reinvested. The whole 
Papal authority exists among us still ; and in divid- 
ing the spoil, the Crown obtains only the Court of 
Arches, while the Episcopacy come in for the keys 
of heaven and hell. Thus the pontifical rights, 
which seemed to have become as disconsolate ghosts 
in the sixteenth century, are again in the body in the 
nineteenth. Like the unclean spirits, had they been 
cast out by the finger of God, with the simplicity of 
a heavenly command, they would have gone to then- 
own place for ever. But under the clumsy exorcism 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 439 

of human policy, they have but wandered awhile 
through the dry places of ecclesiastic controversy, 
seeking rest and finding none : till, seeing the old 
Anglican abode not only temptingly swept and gar- 
nished, but still empty of any diviner spirit, they 
have returned whence they came out; and, being 
now many instead of one, threaten to make the last 
state of that Church worse than the first. The 
Queen's supremacy and the nation's Protestantism 
have far more formidable rivals in the sacerdotal pre- 
tensions of the Church, than in the titles of Catho- 
lic prelates and the boundaries of Papal dioceses. 

Politicians, we are aware, have no belief that any 
mere theory, like that of a priestly polity, can have 
the least practical effect. They do not deny that the 
Liturgy is too Romish ; but they rely on its being 
counteracted by the Calvinistic tone of the Articles, 
and on the tendency to either extreme being virtual- 
ly lost in the predominant good sense and modera- 
tion of the English people. They admit that the 
Church scheme of religion cannot stand the test of 
a severe, or even of a lenient logic ; that it is not a 
consistent whole, and bears evident traces of the 
contradictory energies from whose balance it sprung. 
But this, they contend, which spoils it for the think- 
er, recommends it to the nation. There is some- 
thing to suit every taste ; and he who finds his own 
sentiment reflected from the Collects does not care 
to test it by the Combination. Compromise is the 
secret of all united action and united profession ; 
and the moment you reconcile the formularies with 
each other, you split the Church itself to fragments. 



440 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

Coherence among men must be brought about by 
incoherence in their creeds. It is the peculiar glory 
of the Anglican theology, that it has found a via 
media between the unreformed and the over-reformed 
Churches ; enriches the cold and rigid lines of Puri- 
tanic faith with mediaeval coloring ; places a mixed 
trust on Scripture and tradition, — on history and the 
soul, — on the priest and the prophet, — on reason 
and authority, — on truth and the magistrate. In 
this way extremes are avoided, controversies kept 
within limits, and the tempers of men retained 
around a centre of mildness and sobriety. The 
spirit of the Church impersonates itself to the im- 
agination of the statesman in the form of a bland 
Archbishop, entirely composed of unrealized inclina- 
tions; a little evangelical; something of a Church 
reformer ; not too easy with his clergy ; skilled in 
charitable words, but patient of exclusive things ; 
content to leave doctrine as he finds it ; making no 
attempt to steer the Church in storm, lest he should 
wreck it, but punctually sitting at the helm and read- 
ing prayers for it. 

This favorite style of defence is like the thing de- 
fended, — a via media between truth and falsehood ; 
and suits the national taste for a ready-made opin- 
ion, without the trouble of thought or a care for 
consistency. It is certainly true, that, in order to 
effect combined action, individual views must give 
way, and a course be assented to which probably no 
one person sharing in it regards as the best. But 
there is a manifest distinction to be drawn between 
partnership in external action and partnership in the 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 441 

profession of conviction. You are member of a 
committee for building public baths : one man wants 
them at the east end of the town, another at the 
west; the secretary wants a brick structure, the 
treasurer insists on stone ; the chairman is anxious 
for a Roman design, but you have brought a plan 
from Flanders. In these various suggestions there 
is no absolute right or absolute wrong. No one im- 
agines that his own proposal has more to recom- 
mend it than a certain preponderance of advantage ; 
and he feels that his duty is satisfied when he has 
fairly pointed out the grounds of his preference. 
Nothing that could be gained by substituting his 
scheme for another would be worth the risk of for- 
feiting cooperation. The primary end for which 
the combination was formed is gained by compro- 
mise, and would be lost by unyieldingness. But sup- 
pose you are on the council of a political league, en- 
gaged in preparing a declaration of principles. One 
member moves a preamble announcing the doctrine 
of natural equality; another, equally intent on the 
abolition of serfdom, believes from Scripture in the 
anointing of kings. One is convinced that colonies 
are a mere excuse for cost and jobbing, and should 
be turned adrift ; another, no less zealous for free 
trade, relies on colonial empire as a main element 
of political security and greatness. One is for an 
immediate appeal to arms ; another is president of 
the Peace Society, and insists on disclaiming the 
right to take away human life. What would be the 
reception of the mediating councillor who should 
rise and say : — " Gentlemen, it is plain there must 



442 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

be some mutual concessions. There are many 
points on which we differ; whether there are any on 
which we agree all round is the less necessary to de- 
termine, because on the one practical conclusion we 
all concur, — We must have a declaration, and must 
uphold our league. The document — since it must 
be signed by us all — cannot be all of one complex- 
ion ; no gentleman at this table can expect to deal 
with it as a private paper embodying just his own 
system of ideas. But among reasonable men, look- 
ing mainly to the practical end of securing adher- 
ents to our body, there can be no desire to press se- 
verely on particular views, and perhaps questionable 
niceties. The Address must have many paragraphs, 
and will enable us to assign to each gentleman a 
fair proportion. If the preamble is too strong on 
human equality, it can be corrected by referring in 
the body of the paper to the divine rights of the 
Crown; and if our Quaker friends put too much 
emphasis on their doctrine of passive resistance, we 
can soften it by a postscript demanding that the 
militia be called out. In this way, nobody will be 
able to read through the Declaration without finding 
something to approve ; all tastes will be suited ; each 
one of ourselves, having for the sake of his princi- 
ples put his name to something that qualifies them, 
will be deterred, in case of controversy, from push- 
ing his doctrine to any hurtful, and (let me add) 
vulgar extreme. Amid the general support of sensi- 
ble people, we can easily make all dissentients ap- 
pear in the light of egotists or fanatics." 

If such proposals as these would be intolerable in 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 443 

relation to political profession, they are certainly not 
less so in reference to religious. In affairs of exter- 
nal action, there is a more or less expedient and ef- 
fective, in every gradation. In declarations of faith, 
there can be no such gradation, nor any of the liber- 
ty of honest choice which it allows ; every proposi- 
tion presents itself to the mind as either simply true 
or simply untrue ; and the assent to it is either abso- 
lutely veracious or absolutely unveracious. The 
rule of integrity is not satisfied when a man has pro- 
vided for the due assertion of a truth ; it prohibits 
his ever being consciously a party to the assertion of 
a falsehood ; nor can he compound for a moderate 
allowance of fraudulent statements by an adequate 
mixture of positions heartily believed. In erecting 
a public bath-house, the supporter of brick and the 
advocate for stone may come to a fair agreement, by 
deciding on a brick building with stone facings. 
But in raising the structure of a Faith, the Catholic 
and the Calvinist cannot honestly settle their differ- 
ences by embodying sacerdotal and sacramental doc- 
trines in the Liturgy and Rubric, and throwing the 
Genevan ingredients into the Articles; and what- 
ever peace is secured on such terms is morally dis- 
graceful to both parties, and can be desired only by 
those who see no truth in either. In the practical 
affairs of men, compromise may be brought about 
by inclusion of something that is in favor with each ; 
but in faith and worship, only by exclusion of what- 
ever is offensive to any. This, we are convinced, was 
the principle on which, originally, the services and 
formularies of the Church were framed. There was 



444 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

no " compromise," in the degrading sense in which 
that word is now continually employed, — no inten- 
tional admixture of truth and falsehood out of com- 
plaisance ; but simply an abstinence from statements 
of doctrine in which concurrence seemed impossible. 
But the incongruous mixture then unconsciously 
produced is no longer unconsciously maintained. 
Amid the struggling elements of the Reformation pe- 
riod, when the intellect and reverence, usage and pow- 
er, were settling their respective claims, the just log- 
ical boundary between the new and the old systems 
was long undetermined : the clearest vision could not 
discern it: and it would have been surprising, had 
not attachment to the past preserved some elements 
which would not bear the scrutiny of the future. 
The historical development of three centuries has 
since exhibited the character and fixed the theory of 
the two religions : we know what belongs to each : 
and the controversies of the last fifteen years have 
clearly elicited this result, that where there is pontifi- 
cal doctrine, there cannot be Protestantism ; and that 
where there is a jus divinum, there can be no harmony 
with a free State. This is emphatically the discov- 
ery, legible in the awful handwriting of Providence, 
upon the surface of this age; dazzling enough to 
startle even the heedless multitude, and a timely 
warning to those who would restore the Church be- 
fore her days are numbered. It is now too late to 
sound the praises of compromise : when once it has 
become detected inconsistency, its charm and power 
are gone; it fascinates only the sceptic contemner of 
mankind ; it repels the truthful and the noble. The 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 445 

time is come when the discordant elements must 
part : either within the Prayer-Book, to the revival 
of the Church ; or, in the persons of her disciples, to 
her dissolution. So far is the preservation of the via 
media from being an essential to permanence, that 
it is the most certain mark of a transitional and tem- 
porary Church. No half-way scheme of doctrine, 
throughout the ages of Christendom, has been able 
to sustain itself in any strength ; Semi-Arianism, 
Semi-Pelagianism, moderate Calvinism, are transient 
phenomena of human thought, — like some seed- 
less annual, whose root dies in the ground, — not 
like the natural grass, that grows for ever. What 
scheme of belief, on the other hand, is so coherent 
and compact, what ecclesiastic administration so 
uniform and unbending, as the Roman Catholic, 
whose duration and extent are above rivalry ? It is 
vain by any artificial adjustments, any eclectic com- 
position, to coerce incongruous sentiments into part- 
nership. In each great scheme of faith there is a vi- 
tal principle of its own, which rules its development 
and prescribes the conditions of its vigorous growth. 
To force two into the same organism — like thrust- 
ing a grape-seed into an acorn before you sow it — 
is either to destroy both, or to waste |he strength of 
one in killing the other, and then throwing it off 
when dead. Does not, indeed, the history of the 
English Church itself show the inefficacy of a mixed 
system as an instrument of union ? Is it true that 
she has retained the attachment of both the Catholic 
and the Protestant class of minds in her communion ? 
On the contrary, she has secured the love of neither. 
38 



446 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

No Church born of the Reformation has driven out 
half the number of Dissenters : and as to Romanists, 
she will have created more in this generation than 
the Jesuit missionaries could steal in a century 
from any other communion. Never was incompe- 
tency proved on a scale so gigantic ; never was pre- 
tence more preposterous than that of the Church to 
unite believers of every shade, — with a third of the 
religious English Dissenters, and a third of the em- 
pire Catholics ! Have we not a right to complain, 
as British citizens, that, boasting to be national, she 
cannot keep us together? Nay, that she is incapa- 
ble of even defending us against the very religion 
she was erected to exclude ? — and, what is worse, 
actually reproduces it and supplies it with a centre 
of fresh European life ? Moreover, we have the 
melancholy conviction, that nothing whatever will 
be done towards cutting out the root of the evil. 
The clergy just now are very angry with the Catho- 
lics ; which is taken by simple people as proof that 
they are truly Protestant. There are some, indeed, 
who look a little further, and suggest a revision of 
the Prayer-Book. But what are the alterations con- 
templated? A shortening of the Morning Service, 
— a better selection of the lessons, — an omission 
(unless as a record) of the Athanasian Creed, — with 
such a reform in the rubrics as may exclude Tracta- 
rian histrionics : all good proposals in themselves, 
but leaving the active source of evil entirely un- 
touched. The real mischief of such a phenomenon 
as the temple of St. Barnabas is not in what meets 
the eye, not in vestments, lights, and postures in the 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 447 

piscina and the almoric, in the sign of the cross or 
swell of the organ ; these things are in themselves 
matters of perfect indifference, and, were they mere 
externals, might be as harmlessly allowed as the can- 
dles retained by the Lutherans not only in their 
churches, but even in the baptismal service at private 
houses. But for the meaning they embody, the new 
excesses in these things would be mere spiritual fop- 
peries, which a bishop might usefully castigate with 
peremptory contempt ; they are, however, much more 
than this ; they are more even than the mere court 
etiquette attached by custom and accident to the 
Papal system, disagreeably reminding us of discard- 
ed mummeries ; they are the symbols of one special 
thought, the clear, deliberate, precise language hand- 
ed down for its picturesque expression ; the ceremo- 
nial that surrounds a certain doctrine, which, if true, 
is the living principle, if false, is the consuming dis- 
ease, of pure Christianity. What is that doctrine ? 
That the clergyman is a priest, and the communion- 
table an altar, and that, by letters patent from God, 
it is only through the hands of one and the rites of 
the other that Divine grace can enter any soul of 
man, and sin depart. This it is which alone gives 
significance to the new practices: and this, unfortu- 
nately, has full warrant from the Prayer-Book, and, 
while it stands there, bids defiance to the resources 
of Episcopal discipline. Till it is cancelled, the 
Tractarian acts with reason in introducing his favor- 
ite emblems; the bishop, in prohibiting them, acts 
with no reason at all ; the one has an idea to con- 
vey, the other has none to exclude ; in the hands of 



448 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

the one the contest is for a principle, in that of the 
other it is an empty logomachy. So long as that 
element remains, there could be no more foolish task 
than the reform of the rubrics and the simplification 
of the ritual. You might dress your clergymen like 
Quakers, furnish your chancel in the style of Crom- 
well, make your communion-table like a joiner's 
bench, and set it to the north ; you would find that, as 
silk and surplice do not make a priest, neither can co- 
ercive drab and sackcloth unmake him ; that it is not 
the altar decorations, but the altar doctrine, in which 
the grievance has its life. Take the sacerdotalism 
away : say, with Luther, that every Christian, with 
only the inward ordination of the Spirit, is on a par 
with priest or bishop, and that the minister is but the 
delegated teacher, qualified " proprio motu et gene- 
ral! jure " ; * and all the millinery and upholstery, 
and mystifications of the sanctuary, will spontane- 
ously wither, never to appear again. Some of our 
prelates, many of the clergy, and vast numbers of the 
laity, are well aware of this ; they know, too, that the 
priestly doctrine, with much that hangs upon it, has 
no real life in the heart of the English people, and is 
little better than a monstrous unveracity ; yet they 
will leave it as it is, will screen it as a fundamental 
of the Church, will gladly divert attention from it by 

* See his Essay to the Bohemian brethren, as cited by Dr. Moehler 
in his "Symbolism," Robertson's translation, Yol. II. p. 92. Luther 
here, as was too often the case, deforms a noble truth with coarse in- 
vective. " Catholic ordination is exhibited as a mere daubing, shav- 
ing, and jugglery, whereby naught but lying and idle fools, true priests 
of Satan, were made. One could likewise shave the hair off any sow, 
and put a dress on any block." 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 449 

a vigorous attack on the mere external symptoms, 
which engage the eye and the passions of the multi- 
tude. Englishmen have ceased to look for transpar- 
ent simplicity and directness in their clergy, except 
in matters which lie remote from the dogmas of their 
profession, and, in persons like the Anglicans, seized 
on by some new, perhaps dangerous idea. In the 
mass of the order, and especially in the prelates, the 
class feeling is well known to be so strong as to over- 
power the natural virtues, and enfeeble the Christian 
graces ; to give, unconsciously to the possessor, but 
conspicuously to the observer, not only the double 
tongue, but the double mind to work it, to teach the 
outspoken the arts of reserve, to bind the living and 
truth-loving intellect to the dead bodies of the very 
errors which, in days of nobler prowess, itself has 
slain, and even oblige it to provoke them into vivaci- 
ty again, and show them off as if they were alive, 
No amount or solemnity of profession can afford the 
least index to a clergyman's real state of mind in a 
Church where Catholics, Calvinists, Latitudinarians, 
all protest, by hundreds, their entire and detailed as- 
sent to the same elaborate system of theology ; the 
result is, that the preachers of truth in their own 
place and office are the very last persons in the na- 
tion to be believed ; that the pulpit is as little trust- 
ed for sincerity as that appointed resort of hired ad- 
vocacy, the bar ; that the letters of the bishops in 
crises like the present are not read as reliable ex- 
pressions of the writers' minds, but watched as diplo- 
matic manifestoes, and studied as the artful move- 
ments of a game. Hence there is no hope that 
38* 



450 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

any bishop will do more for the Church than die in 
it. To seize the moment for effective revival, the 
moment of detected incompetency, of inevitable 
change, of reanimated Protestantism, of lay interest 
and enthusiasm, of pacified nonconformity, and by 
trenchant reforms call back the alienated portion of 
the nation, is an enterprise beyond the aims, and, 
mainly on that account, beyond the power, of 
those to whom England is ecclesiastically intrusted. 
And so not even the glaring offence of the hour will 
be removed ; but, after stripping off a few of the blos- 
soms and leaves of Romanism, the sacerdotal root 
will be left in the ground, — to put forth anew, when-' 
ever brought once more under the light of a genius 
intense enough to nurture it, and under the hus- 
bandry of Oxford Apostles, God will give the retrib- 
utive increase. * 

But, we shall be asked, will you not allow people 
to believe in priests and their divine prerogatives? 
Would you pass a law to hinder it, or compel the 
High-Churchmen to erase the doctrine from their 
system ? Far from it ; let every man be entirely 
free to profess and worship according to his 'con- 
science. We only say, that this doctrine operates as 
a disqualification for the exclusive alliance with the 
State of any Church that holds it ; and can never be 
politically harmless, except where either all sects or 
no sects are endowed by the commonwealth. The 
reason is plain. When a body of men tell us, that 
they are sole trustees under God of a certain set of 
dogmas and channels of grace, they are bound to 
guard the sacred deposit with incorruptible care, and 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 451 

to hand it down from age to age without the shadow 
of a change. Their primary obligation is the preser- 
vation of an immutable identity of teaching and 
administration. On the other hand, the primary 
necessity of a free people is an incessant change of 
thought and character ; and the primary duty of their 
government is to readapt their institutions to the 
successive states of the national mind. To suppose 
that this law of change in human society will make 
an exception in favor of religion, is a weak defiance 
of all experience. However fixed the objective sour- 
ces of faith may be, they cannot fall on changing 
minds with unchanged results. New arts, new liter- 
ature, new wealth, — an altered distribution of social 
classes, — a quickened circulation of ideas, — a copi- 
ous importation of foreign thought, — inevitably pro- 
duce a different people, before whom you cannot pre- 
sent the problems of religion with only the old re- 
sults. The State, we conceive, must look upon this 
as a fact; and, ere committing itself to exclusive al- 
liance with any body of disciples, must stipulate, as 
an indispensable condition, that they have a flexible 
faith ; not, of course, that individuals are to be called 
upon to hold loosely by their own convictions, but 
that there is to be no bar to silent and spontaneous 
modification from age to age. This is precisely the 
condition which a sacerdotal communion is bound 
to repudiate : if it remain not inflexible, it is a traitor 
to its stewardship : and so incompatible are the du- 
ties of the two, that the highest faithfulness of a 
templar church is supreme unfaithfulness in an Es- 
tablishment. The coexistence of the two functions 



452 MARTINEAU ? S MISCELLANIES. 

— political and pontifical — is simply impossible; 
either the nation must give up its will, or the church 
its trust. This is better understood at present by 
the priest than the statesman ; and is shown with 
admirable irony in the following sentences : — 

" As physical life assimilates to itself, or casts off, what- 
ever it encounters, allowing no interference with the su- 
premacy of its own principle, so is it with social and civil. 
When a body politic grows, takes definite shape, and ma- 
tures, it slights, though it may endure, the vestiges and 
tokens of its rude beginnings. It may cherish them as cu- 
riosities, but it abjures them as precedents. They may 
hang about it as the shrivelled blossom around the formed 
fruit ; but they are dead, and will be sure to disappear as 
soon as they are felt to be troublesome. Common sense 
tells us they do not apply to things as they are ; and if indi- 
viduals attempt to insist on them, they will but bring on 
themselves the just imputation of vexatiousness and extrav- 
agance. So it is with the Anglican formularies ; they are 
but the expression of the national sentiment, and therefore 
are necessarily modified by it. Did the nation grow into 
Catholicity, they might easily be made to assume a Catholic 
demeanor ; but as it has matured in its Protestantism, they 
must take, day by day, a more Evangelical and liberal 
aspect. Of course I am not saying this by way of justifying 
individuals in professing and using doctrinal and devotional 
forms from which they dissent ; nor am I denying that 
words have, or at least ought to have, a definite meaning 
which must not be explained away ; I am merely stating 
what takes place in matter of fact, allowably in some cases, 
wrongly in others, according to the strength on the one 
hand of the wording of the formulary, and of the diverging 
opinion on the other. I say, that a nation's laws are a na- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 453 

tion's property, and have their life in the nation's sentiment : 
and where that living intelligence does not shine through 
them, they become worthless and are put aside, whether 
formally or on an understanding. Now Protestantism is, as 
it has been for centuries, the nation's religion : and since 
the semi-patristical church which was set up for the nation 
at the Reformation is the organ of that religion, it must live 
for the nation ; it must hide its Catholic aspirations in folios, 
or in college cloisters ; it must call itself Protestant when it 
gets into the pulpit ; it must abjure antiquity ; for woe to it, 
if it attempt to thrust the wording of its own documents in 
its master's path, if it rely on a passage in its Visitation for 
the Sick, or an article of the Creed, or on the tone of its 
Collects, or on a catena of its divines, when the age has de- 
termined on a theology more in keeping with the progress 
of knowledge ! The antiquarian, the reader of history, the 
theologian, the philosopher, the Biblical student, may make 
his protest ; he may quote St. Austin, or appeal to the can- 
ons, or argue from the nature of the case ; but la Reine le 
veut ; the English people is sufficient for itself ; it wills to 
be Protestant and progressive ; and fathers, councils, and 
schoolmen, Scriptures, saints, angels, and what is above 
them, must give way. What are they to it ? It thinks, acts, 
and is contented, according to its own practicable, intelli- 
gible, shallow religion ; and of that religion its bishops, its 
divines, will they or will they not, must be exponents." — 
Newman's Lectures, p. 18. 

We simply borrow the lecturer's argument, and 
turn it round. He says to the Anglican ecclesiastics, 
" As an established clergy, you cannot be faithful to 
your priestly vows ": we rather say, " As faithful to 
your priestly vows, you cannot be an established 
clergy. " He says, " The nation will constrain you 



454 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

not to serve your conscience " : we more respect- 
fully contend, " Your conscience will constrain you 
not to serve the nation." The divergence of the two 
obligations is forcibly brought home to us by the de- 
mand, just now so frequently urged, for the revival 
of convocation, or the organization of some new 
chamber, for the settlement of ecclesiastical affairs. 
The question immediately arises, In what capacity 
is the body to meet ? — as priesthood, or as estab- 
lishment? — as divine corporation, or as human ? — 
as answerable to God alone, or under responsibility 
to the nation ? On the answer to these questions 
would depend the whole composition of the assem- 
bly. Who are to be represented ? If only the asso- 
ciation of persons bound together by belief in the 
Articles and baptism into the same communion, 
then must the representatives be all Churchmen, if 
not all priests ; they must qualify at the parish altar, 
and produce credentials from the parish register. 
But if the national Establishment is the thing to be 
represented and discussed, then must the representa- 
tives be drawn indiscriminately from the whole body 
of Establishes, that is, from the nation at large ; and 
the Assembly would be but a duplicate of Parlia- 
ment. In the former case, the definitions of doc- 
trine and rules of discipline adopted would be sim- 
ply declaratory of the sentiments of a particular sect : 
they could have no binding force in reference to the 
ecclesiastical constitution of the country : they could 
not be imported as new conditions into the compact 
with the State. The utmost that could be allowed 
would be, that they should come before Parliament 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 455 

as proposals, — if approved, to become law ; if disap- 
proved, to terminate the partnership between the 
nation and the Church, and to forfeit the temporal 
endowments of the spiritual corporation. In the lat- 
ter case, the decrees adopted would determine the 
doctrine and discipline on which the nation resolved 
to insist in any ecclesiastical body henceforth admit- 
ted or retained for endowment. They would obtain, 
after royal assent, the validity of law : and it would 
then remain for the body hitherto established to de- 
cide whether it will accept these conditions, or 
transfer the national trust to others who are prepared 
to do so. As a body under priesthood, the Church 
is a corporation with a charter from on high ; and 
when its affairs are in confusion, they must be set in 
order by prayer and discussion with closed doors on 
the part of the corporators themselves. As an Es- 
tablishment, the Church is a corporation with a char- 
ter from the State, and when its working needs 
revision, it must be brought before the legislature, 
for reform, not only in the administration, but, if 
requisite, in the constitution of its charter. This dis- 
tinction was of little moment during the first century 
after the separation from Rome ; because throughout 
that period the persons composing the State and 
those composing the Church were the same : the di- 
vine charter, however variously interpreted, was uni- 
versally recognized as creating an incorporation 
which was to be coextensive (at the least) with the 
nation : the idea prevailed of one only Christian 
communion ; and even those who could not join in 
its actual conditions hoped to obtain changes which 



456 MARTINEATj's MISCELLANIES. 

would bring them in. All ecclesiastical differences 
lay, therefore, within the Church, among parties 
struggling to grasp and wield in their own sense its 
undisputed and undivided authority. In the dis- 
putes which arose between the temporal and the spir- 
itual powers, — in the variance, for instance, between 
Convocation and Parliament as to the nature of the 
royal supremacy, — the collision was not between 
two classes or bodies of men, but between two func- 
tions of the same body ; between the clerical and the 
lay element of a single communion. But since the 
Restoration, these conditions of the problem have 
been passing away ; and it is impossible any longer 
to consider the State and the Church as merely two 
aspects of one community. The Act of Uniformity 
was the commencement of that fatal policy which 
seeks unity by exclusion, instead of by comprehen- 
sion. By driving the spiritual exiles to despair of 
their return, it set them on providing separately for 
themselves. Compelled to regard their ejected con- 
dition as no longer provisional, they gradually found- 
ed their own institutions, educated their own clergy, 
and in baptism, ordination, creed, and worship 
formed themselves into independent societies. From 
that moment was realized a condition entirely new ; 
namely, the coexistence of many communions on the 
same soil. Still, the time had not fully come when 
the State and the Church should be composed of 
different persons ; for the Nonconformists, in turning 
their backs upon the Church, had, for a time, to for- 
feit their position in the State; and, for relief of 
conscience, paid the price of their civil rights. At 



THE BxVTTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 457 

first treated as enemies, then endured as fieroiKo^ they 
slowly approached a recognized isopolity. Now, 
however, they fully belong to the State, without be- 
longing to the Church ; the personal range of the 
two bodies is no longer coextensive ; and the Church, 
in its relation with the State, has to deal, not with 
the laic function of her own life, but with an eternal 
power, partially in the hands of those who do not 
own her. The State, in other words, has outgrown 
the Church ; and in readjusting their relations, the 
legislature cannot narrow its view to the old ecclesi- 
astic circle, and work within the conditions there 
laid down ; it is bound to provide for the nation in 
its enlarged proportions ; and, as in the case of a 
small borough expanded to a great town, to throw 
down the municipal boundaries, and modify the cor- 
porate rights, in a way to render them commen- 
surate with modern wants. In the performance of 
this undeniable duty, Parliament, amid many em- 
barrassing problems, would have the advantage of 
one principle perfectly clear; namely, that, if the 
Episcopal Church is to continue in her established 
position, her sacerdotal doctrine must be withdrawn, 
and her pretended charter of sacramental trust be 
surrendered ; because this the whole nation beyond 
her communion, and probably the vast majority 
within it, entirely disown. Whatever differences 
there may be among the sects, on this the very 
fact of their nonconformity proves their unanim- 
ity. Were this removed, the work of producing a 
truly National Religious Establishment would in- 
deed be only begun. But while it stands, not even 
39 



458 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

can a beginning be made; a hopeless bar remains 
between the growing margin of the nation, and the 
contracting area of the Church, — a bar, moreover, 
scarcely less hateful to the laity within, than to the 
unbaptized multitude without. In the present tem- 
per of the country, there is a happy consent between 
the Dissenters, and all but the retrograde portion of 
the Church, most favorable to a reform of the Prayer- 
Book in this sense. The external forces that lie 
beyond the Anglican pale would raise no storm to 
interrupt such a work; they would either sleep 
around it in indifference, or watch it with supporting 
sympathy. All the turmoil would spring up to the 
interior. Certain it is, that, under such a charge, 
Dr. Pusey could not accomplish his vow to die in 
the Church of England. The moment her " priest- 
hood" is converted into an unpretending " ministry," 
a Tractarian secession is inevitable. But however 
formidable such an occurrence might be, whether it 
took the shape of a new schism or of a Papal re- 
lapse, its evasion or postponement must incur a far 
greater danger, — the perpetuated reproduction of 
Romanism by the agency of the Church herself. On 
this point we have the judgment of a very compe- 
tent observer, who watches the course of events from 
the Papal side. The Rev. W. Maskell, having 
joined the Roman Catholic Church, records the fol- 
lowing opinion in a letter to the Morning Chron- 
icle : — 

" If ever the day should come that both the Prayer-Book 
and the Articles should speak, whether upon this side or 
upon that, no matter which, one uniform, consistent Ian- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 



459 



guage, controversy between members of the English Church 
and Catholics must take a very different line. For myself, 
I do not hesitate to declare, that, in my judgment, the 
strongest of all our hopes rests on the continuance, unchanged, 
of the present English formularies ; and that no immediate 
accession to us of numbers, however large, would compen- 
sate in the end for the slower but more sure gain, from an 
unceasing flow into the One Church of men inquiring hon- 
estly for truth."" 

Leave to Rome undisputed occupation of the sa- 
cerdotal field, and the domain will soon cease to be 
enlarged. The preparation thus made for national- 
izing the Church must no doubt be followed up. 
The first effect is to throw out a large body from her 
communion : and unless this be compensated by re- 
inforcements from without, her position in the coun- 
try will be less tenable than ever. But the grand 
obstacle in the way of such reinforcements is re- 
moved, when the clergy no longer pretend to hold 
the dogmas which they teach by any higher tenure 
than that of private judgment and conscience in in- 
terpreting the sources of divine knowledge. Their 
responsibility retires within the modest dimensions 
of their own personal sphere ; and asks only that 
their conscience and their teaching shall have free 
scope of activity. It ceases to be aggressive; and 
being conscious of no title which others do not 
equally possess, they exchange the insolent ignoring 
of their neighbors for respectful, however firm, dis- 
sent. Among men thus minded, of what religion 
must the National Church be the organ ? Assuredly 
of the national religion. It is vain to pretend a 



46(5 



MARTINEAITS MISCELLANIES. 



duty on her part to sanction nothing but the ab- 
solute truth. She has no resources for discriminat- 
ing the absolute truth. With the repudiation of 
pontifical claims, she loses the false semblance of 
an objective oracle for the determination of doubts ; 
and can do no more in this matter than produce in 
her teachers the subjective conditions favorable for 
the discernment of truth, — the sound learning, the 
Christian temper, the unanxious thought. If these 
claims are to be rejected, not in vindication of indis- 
pensable freedom, but as means of tighter bondage, 
— -if, when they are gone, we are left with a creed 
simply narrower by their expulsion, —better let 
them remain. But we are persuaded that both laity 
and clergy are ashamed of the ridiculous affectation 
of a dogmatic unity to which every Sunday pub- 
lishes a thousand contradictions. They well know 
that, in spite of this pretence, the English Church 
harbors every great heresy that ever provoked the 
peremptoriness of Rome, and among her writers of 
renown can produce the modern counterparts of 
Arius and Eutyches, of Pelagius and Sabellius ; nay, 
the mere politician appeals to these notorious dif- 
ferences as redounding to the praise of the Church, 
and giving evidence of the wide scope of liberty 
practically enjoyed by her members. "We accept 
the fact, but must refuse the praise. For the ques- 
tion occurs, whether the Church gives this latitude, 
or whether her members take it. We cannot consent 
to credit her with a result, which all her resources 
are always strained to prevent before it takes place, 
and to disown afterwards ; but which she is at once 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 461 

too weak to suppress and too uncandid to acknowl- 
edge. Those who belong to her communion enjoy 
the latitude they have, not because they belong to 
the Church, but because they live in England ; the 
free secular spirit of which is too much for the eccle- 
siastical influence in the opposite direction. He- 
retical clergymen and bishops are forced upon the 
Church by statesmen who look only at their personal 
qualities, or by patrons who appoint from consid- 
erations of family, not of creed. For the praise of 
liberality the Church must wait till she has sponta- 
neously relaxed some one of the dogmatic restric- 
tions by which she fences her rigid orthodoxy round. 
So far as, without doing this, she admits heterodox 
theologians, it is by a shameful unveracity. That is 
a price too dear to pay for any dogmatic comprehen- 
siveness : nor can the Church relish such admiration 
as was once lavished by an esprit fort on some of 
the sceptic priests of the first French revolution. 
" Our clergy, to be sure, are all perjured; but then, 
how charmingly liberal ! " If we are called on to 
choose between an intellectual and a moral good, we 
are constrained, not to applaud the freedom, but to 
condemn the falsehood; — the more so, as all the. 
intellectual freedom is undeniably furnished by the 
spirit of the nation, and all the moral falsehood by 
the system of the Church. Latitude on these terms 
has none of the benefit of an allowed liberty. It is 
a mere forfeiture of unity without the gain of com- 
prehensiveness ; for when thought larger than the 
creed gets in, it is only on condition that it be not 
scrupulous. Our Church has thus neither enjoyed 
39* 



462 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

the advantages of freedom, nor secured the rewards 
of oppression. She has, however, effectually de- 
stroyed the pretended plea, that in her teaching we 
have a witness to some system of coherent and un- 
alterable truth. Absolute truth then being wrapped, 
if amongst us at all, in impenetrable disguise, cannot 
be an object of selection : and we can find no claim- 
ant for establishment, if it be not the national re- 
ligion : and what that may be is happily a thing 
easily determinable by vote. In revising the formu- 
laries, nothing should be retained which conclusively 
offends the convictions of any considerable class of 
worshippers : its retention would be a positive griev- 
ance to those whom it would repel: its omission 
would compromise no religious teacher, provided he 
were free to supply it in his personal preaching, and 
to seek a congregation in sympathy with his belief. 
Such a relaxation of the dogmatic bond would prob- 
ably not add a single new mode of sentiment to 
those already existing in the Church. It would be 
simply a change from an insincere to a sincere allow- 
ance of inevitable and actual varieties ; — a change 
which, we are convinced, would be acceptable, not 
only to the essentially veracious mind of the secular 
Englishman, but to that pure and faithful religion 
which, in every communion, is impatient of pretence, 
and fears no reality. The State, at all events, can- 
not, in its dealing with ecclesiastical institutions, 
proceed upon any abstruse theological theory, or 
limit its basis to the decisions of Nice, of Chalce- 
don, or of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. It 
can only accept the facts before it, and recognize the 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 463 

religion which has living possession of the mind of 
the nation, and declares itself unmistakably in their 
labors and sacrifices on its behalf. There are but 
two ways in which this can be done : either the 
strongest of the actual sects may be taken as ex- 
pressive of the general will, to the exclusion of all 
the rest; or they may be all assumed as partial dec- 
larations of national faith, to which, as a whole, no 
one of them is competent to give complete expres- 
sion. The first method cannot be persisted in, with- 
out exposing the most divine element of civilization 
to a series of violent revolutions, and enthroning, in 
naked might, the very influence which is to teach 
the world the inviolable sanctity of right. The most 
powerful spiritual body in the country may yet com- 
prise but a minority of the inhabitants. Its favored 
position will be felt as an injustice, and will naturally 
provoke a crusade, which, on the first confederation 
of the hostile forces, will succeed in the work of de- 
liberate destruction, and then miserably scramble 
towards a fortuitous reconstruction. The second 
method is undeniably the true exponent of the pres- 
ent facts of society, and can alone restore religion to 
its tranquil and dignified position above the secular 
rivalries of the world. "We believe that the great 
mass of the English laity would rejoice in such a 
change in the formularies of the Church as would al- 
low the gradual return to conformity of classes now 
excluded by scruples which no honest conscience can 
despise. Is it objected that but a slender creed 
would remain if it omitted every thing which was 
inadmissible by Wesleyan and Baptist, Indepen- 



464 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

dent and Arian ? We reply, in the first place, that 
with the slenderness or fulness of the creed, the State, 
in determining the conditions of established support, 
has nothing to do. If there be enough in it to train 
good men and citizens, to nurture the sentiments of 
duty, and, by spontaneous reverence, bring about, 
and in a better way, all the highest ends of law, 
there is sufficient to entitle it to recognition. It ex- 
presses the weighty fact, that the noblest aims of 
civil society are embodied in the private faith of its 
members, and anticipated by their aspirations. We 
reply, in the second place, that whoever felt the creed 
to be defective should be at perfect liberty to fill it in 
from his own supplementary convictions. Beyond 
the public liturgies, which should be much shortened, 
range might be left in every service for the free min- 
istrations of the clergyman. It would be no doubt 
necessary, in order to secure harmony, under this 
free system, between the pastor and his people, to 
give the congregations a voice in the appointment of 
their ministers. But against this no objection can 
be made, except on behalf of the patron's interest, — 
an interest which, through long abuse and sordid sale, 
has become so odious to the religious feeling of the 
country, as to be plainly marked for destruction, un- 
less speedily redeemed by compromise with the prin- 
ciple of congregational election. If the State, by a 
regulated education, such as it requires in preparation 
for the other professions, provides the class of relig- 
ious teachers, while the natural affinities of churches 
have play in allocating individuals, security is taken 
that religion shall be purified by passing through an 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 465 

enriched and practised intellect ; and yet an appeal 
is left to that nameless spiritual instinct by which 
alone the presence of a living heart can be detected. 
Under such an arrangement, the Church would soon 
cease to be disgraced by all the shameful abuses of 
a close corporation. It would no longer be true, that, 
out of twelve thousand benefices, eight thousand are 
transmitted by purchase and sale, and upwards of 
three thousand in the possession of non-resident in- 
cumbents. It would no longer be endured, when 
once the laity are admitted into the concerns of the 
clergy, that laborious pastors should starve on £ 35 
a year, and be indebted for £ 30 of it to Ecclesias- 
tical Cammissioners,* some of whom, for sixteen 
years, have enjoyed from the Church an annual rev- 
enue of £ 10,000, and appropriated west-end fines to 
an untold amount, modestly estimated at half a mil- 
lion. We fear, indeed, that the admission of more 
popular control into ecclesiastical affairs affords the 
only hope of remedy for mismanagement and misuse, 
more flagrant than can now be found in any depart- 
ment of the State.* The diocesan and capitular con- 
science is too easy ; the Parliamentary check is too 
slow, and too much broken by official obstructions ; 
and nothing but a local and provincial element of 
lay administration, the recognition of a municipal 



* See " Return to the House of Commons of the Number of Small 
Livings augmented by Grants at the Disposal of the Ecclesiastical 
Commissioners," June 4, 1850. The living referred to is the Perpetual 
Curacy of Staindrop, Durham, page 31 of the Return. How many 
livings of £ 5 a year are unaugmented by the Ecclesiastical Commis- 
sioners is not recorded. 



466 MARTINEAIj's MISCELLANIES. 

principle in Church affairs, will suffice to break up 
the sacred oligarchy, and let in the honest daylight 
on the mystification of their affairs. The rudiments 
of such a scheme must be sought in the enlarged 
powers of each congregation for self-government, and 
the concession to it of a voice in the election of its 
pastor. 

We confess, however, to a doubt, whether a plan 
of comprehension such as we have imagined is not 
now too late. The Church, long abandoned to the 
slumber of a lazy conservatism, is, indeed, awake 
with a better spirit, and abounds with devoted min- 
isters and high-minded laymen. But in an age so 
rapid and impatient as ours, repentance may easily 
miss the tide ; and we fear that, after every effort and 
concession has been spent, England will remain with 
many churches instead of one. The free develop- 
ment of separate denominations has proceeded very 
far. It has created a number of powerful organiza- 
tions, each of which, in its continued operation, has 
worked for itself a distinct social channel, and ap- 
propriated a scarce disputed domain. It has cov- 
ered the populous portion of the land with chapels 
and school-houses, and so accumulated around the 
sectarian centres of administration a vast cluster of 
properties, all in active use. It has called into ex- 
istence many societies, occupying different spheres, 
for the advancement of popular education, and sev- 
eral colleges for the cultivation of the higher learn- 
ing, and the special training of a Christian ministry. 
After English society has so long set into these 
forms, it may well be doubted whether their contin- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 467 

uance has much dependence on the phraseology of 
the Liturgy or the breadth of the Articles. When, 
too, it is remembered, that, if the variances in dog- 
matic theology were all happily smoothed away, 
questions of ecclesiastical discipline would arise, 
and that to some Nonconformists Episcopacy is of- 
fensive, while others insist on the independent isola- 
tion of each knot of worshippers, it will scarcely ap- 
pear feasible to remodel any one communion so as 
to embrace them all. Is there, then, no hope of that 
return to greater unity, after which, amid all the din 
of seeming strife, the spirit of the nation evidently 
pines ? We do not despair. Nonconformity is now 
aware of its inadequacy to the complicated wants of 
the nation ; feels the heavy burden of voluntary tax- 
ation ; and begins to reckon the waste of a number 
of rival efforts of the same kind upon the same spot. 
Moreover, the affinities which originally distributed 
the religious population into its several masses are 
rapidly changing; repulsions are acting around the 
centre of every sect, and attractions making them- 
selves felt across the borders. Only the habits of a 
declining principle of vitality hold the present forms 
together ; the incipient life of the future is loosening 
them for unexpected recombination. Looking at 
the whole matter from a point beyond the inclosure 
of sects, we see in both the Church and the Dissent- 
ers aptitudes for special work which cannot be in- 
terchanged between them ; and we see vast national 
endowments which ought to be made subservient to 
the impartial spiritual culture of the whole people. 
The State is the trustee of those endowments ; and, 



468 MARTINEAU's MISCELLANIES. 

as judge of the rules by which they should be dis- 
pensed, may become the point of unity in which the 
various laborers and recipients may find their separ- 
ation lost. It is not unnatural to look at the course 
of public education as affording some augury in rela- 
tion to the direction of ecclesiastical affairs. The 
competing societies of the Church and the Dissent- 
ers (the National and the British and Foreign) with 
the Wesleyan and the Catholic school associations, 
have so far relaxed their severe voluntaryism as to 
stand in common relation to the committee intrust- 
ed with the distribution of the Parliamentary grant 
for education. Separate in their actions, free in 
their several movements, they meet in the presence 
of the State. The inherent feebleness of voluntary 
institutions, and the difficulty felt by an aristocratic 
corporation like the Church in grasping the whole 
population of this land, may surely lead to a similar 
ecclesiastical partnership, through the mediation of 
the civil government, commanding for the purpose, 
not a mere Parliamentary grant, but the vast re- 
mains of a long-wasted and abused Church property. 
Thus to gather up all the religious agencies of the 
country, under the headship of the State, without 
encroachment on religious freedom, would doubtless 
be a most arduous and delicate task; yet, in the 
hands of a great statesman, by no means impossible. 
We can imagine a series of measures by which the 
end might be gradually approached, without appar- 
ent offence to the most sensitive conscience. Were 
the Act of Uniformity repealed, the use of the ser- 
vices of the Prayer-Book, in their complete and unal- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 469 

tered form, would no longer be obligatory on the 
clergy ; and a power of adapting the modes of wor- 
ship to the convictions of the worshippers would be 
left. Episcopal ordination, however, would still re- 
main indispensable; so that the external boundaries 
of the Establishment would not thus be enlarged, 
though its interior latitude would be increased. In 
order to secure this further advantage, liberty might 
be given to parishes, after some regulated compro- 
mise with the patrons, — to elect their own ministers ; 
— no one being eligible except a person with a Uni- 
versity degree and ordination or recognition accord- 
ing to the usages of some one denomination known 
to the law. This would enable a parish to become 
Wesleyan or Presbyterian, if such change accorded 
with the predominent feeling of the place. To meet 
the financial problems to which such cases would 
give rise, it would be necessary to vest in an Eccle- 
siastical Administration, fully responsible to Parlia- 
ment, the whole of the Church property, with pow- 
ers, duly guarded and checked by locally elected 
Boards, of redistribution according to the real exi- 
gencies of each neighborhood. But not only must 
Nonconformist persons be rendered admissible ; Non- 
conformist institutions and property must be made 
susceptible of ecclesiastical adoption. To accom- 
plish this, it might be provided that, on the surren- 
der of any Dissenting chapel to the ecclesiastical 
trustees, such chapel should lapse to the National 
Church estate ; and the congregation, ceasing to be 
a private club, would be incorporated into the pub- 
lic system, and, on certain conditions, would become 
40 



470 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

entitled to a stipend computed in the compound 
ratio of its necessities and its beneficent activity. 
The conditions referred to need not be complicated, 
though their definition would require the utmost 
clearness and caution. They must be absolutely 
free from every possibility of interference with relig- 
ious belief, and comprise no other inquiry than in- 
to the extent of social service rendered by a society 
as instructor of the poor and the young; and in the 
estimate of this a large influence should be assigned 
to the judgment of the district. To secure good 
service in the clergyman, a minimum of stipend 
should be fixed, and a part of it always drawn from 
the efforts and award of his congregation or neigh- 
borhood. Not one of these provisions would in the 
slightest degree touch the independence of either the 
Church or the Dissenters. They do not meddle with 
the Prayer-Book, except negatively, by declining any 
longer to enforce its compulsory use ; and the mem- 
bers of the Episcopalian communion might freely 
settle for themselves, in any representative assembly 
possessing their confidence, whether they would al- 
ter or wholly retain their present formularies. A 
similar freedom of internal organization and govern- 
ment would be left with every sect. Nor, again, is 
there the least interference with those Nonconform- 
ist Societies who might choose to remain on the 
basis of pure voluntaryism. They are exposed to 
no disadvantage, made liable to no tax, and, for 
aught they would ever meet with in their own ex- 
perience, might remain unconscious that any altera- 
tion had been made. One political change of seri- 



THE BATTLE OF THE CHURCHES. 471 

cms magnitude would, however, be involved in such 
a series of measures. All ground would be removed 
for retaining the bishops in the House of Lords. 
The religious communion to which they belong 
would be only one among several churches em- 
braced within the national establishment; and if the 
Episcopalians were to have their spiritual Peers, so 
must other religious bodies now introduced into a 
similar relation to the State. Justice would require 
that this political privilege should be either abolished 
or extended ; and it cannot be reasonably doubted 
which method of equalization would be most agree- 
able at once to the political and the religious senti- 
ment of the country. It is not our purpose to fill up 
this outline. "We sketch it simply to indicate a 
course, which, however strange to the imagination 
now, appears to us more practicable — no less than 
more desirable — than either the unyielding reten- 
tion of the Church as it is, or the entire repudiation 
of all national interest in religion, and the utter sac- 
rifice, to the ends of mere financial economy, of the 
noble ecclesiastical endowments inherited from for- 
mer times. We see nothing inconsistent with the 
sentiments proper to the devoutest Christian in a 
recognition of religion, left to its free development, 
as the highest department of a nation's culture ; and 
think that the objection to this springs rather from 
low and irreverent notions of the State, than from 
any elevated conception of the offices of the Church. 
Not till the old Greek reverence for the public polity 
of a nation shall blend itself with the spirituality of 



472 MARTINEAU'S MISCELLANIES. 

the Christian's private and personal faith, will the 
restless antagonism of egotism with social power in 
secular affairs, of individual conscience with gener- 
al law in morals and religion, cease, and pass into a 
harmony. 



THE END. 



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